The Infinite Coastline Paradox and the importance of working through technical challenges on your own

The Infinite Coastline Paradox and the importance of working through technical challenges on your own

There are unknown worlds to explore, hidden within the seemingly simplest of tasks

According to the Infinite Coastline Paradox, the length of the coastline increases as our measurements become more precise. Imagine measuring the length of the coastline around Great Britain. If you only had a meter stick to lay end to end around the entire coast, you would get a seemingly accurate measurement. Now imagine you were to re-measure the coastline with a tiny centimeter stick. Now you can fit your measuring device into many more nooks and crevices around the edge of the landmass, which would increase the length of your total measurement considerably. As you can imagine how this continues, the smaller your measuring device, the more accurately you can fit it into smaller and smaller details of the coastline. Which means the length of the coastline is theoretically infinite, as your measuring device becomes more and more accurate.

Now let’s apply this concept to the idea of solving technical challenges. Perhaps the best way to transfer to concept over to discrete challenges is in the context of “toy problems” which are the “short stories of coding challenges”. These are discrete algorithmic tasks that are generally meant to be solved in a single session, and are often used as gating assessments during technical interviews.

Most published toy problems also have published solutions and video lectures on how to solve them. A common pitfall would be to turn to a video or solution before spending time trying to solve it on your own.

When first looking at and estimating the steps required to solve a technical challenge, you might compare that to looking at a satellite or aerial photo of a large land mass. The relative size and area of the structure are apparent, and a rough estimate can be made as to what sort of effort it would take to circumnavigate the “landmass of the problem”.

If you then take the shortcut of looking at the solution, you might be able to memorize the steps and repeat a solution to the problem at hand. But that is kind of like measuring the coastline of the landmass with a large stick. So what was lost by not working through the problem on your own? Well, when you really get inside a problem that you thought required only 5 steps to solve, that’s when you start to look at it more closely, like bringing out a more accurate measurement device. At that point, you might find that the 5 steps each had 5 steps of their own hidden inside. And what if each of those 5 steps had multiple additional steps?

To work through all those steps on your own, you get to explore inside hidden layers of complexity and explore the potentially vast surface area, hiding treasures of discovery and learning. All of those hidden layers that you go through on your own will also inform your problem solving process going forward, informing all of the future challenges you might encounter as well.

This blog post is a transcription of a motivational talk I gave to one of the groups of students I currently work with as a full time Technical Mentor at Hack Reactor.