Member Avatar for static

Hi everybody,

I just want to know whether playing brainstorming game like Sudoku or chess can improve programming concepts.
In my opinion, I don't think the way of thinking in programming concepts and in playing chess are the same.

Let me know your discussion.

Thank you all.

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  • Latest Post Latest Post by ddanbe

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raised a useful question. Short, practical answer: puzzle and strategy games can strengthen specific thinking habits that matter for programming — modeling state, designing search/heuristics, testing hypotheses — but they are a supplement, not a replacement for deliberate coding practice. was right to see some overlap; is also right that the venue matters, but the techniques below turn play into concrete skill gains.

Transferable skills

  • Problem decomposition: breaking a big puzzle into smaller tasks maps directly to designing functions and modules.
  • State modeling: treating a board or grid as a state helps with data structures and immutability concepts.
  • Search and heuristics: games force you to pick moves by exploring possibilities, which mirrors algorithms like minimax or backtracking.
  • Constraint reasoning: Sudoku is naturally a constraint problem and trains you to encode and enforce rules.
  • Iterative debugging: changing a strategy after a failed line of play is the same loop as test, diagnose, fix.

Practical ways to convert play into programming skill

  • Turn a puzzle into a coding project: implement a Sudoku solver to learn backtracking and constraint propagation (constraint satisfaction problem, ).
  • Build a simple chess move generator and a minimax search to learn state trees and pruning (minimax).
  • Use unit tests, profiling, and refactoring on those projects so you practice real engineering tasks: correctness, performance, readability.
  • Explain heuristics in comments or a short README — translating tacit strategy into explicit rules is a core programming skill.

Caution: empirical work on transfer shows benefits are often task-specific (transfer of learning). Use games as targeted exercises and combine them with real project work, code review, and deliberate practice for the best results.

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Member Avatar for FallenPaladin

Hi there, you raise an interesting topic. I am relatively new to programming, as such I see a direct correlation between logical problem solving games and programming.

Chess for example has a limited number of opening moves, and how the game evolves depends on the events triggered by the players. In this respect I think that there is some benefit, but only minimal, and that programming skills may be more easily reversed to be applied to the problem solving.

This is just my view though.

Member Avatar for ddanbe

Intresting discussion about programming in general. But I think this is the wrong forum for it.

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