"By 10pm, I was starving and out of ideas. I rounded up people for dinner, hoping to get a break from thinking about the project, but all we could talk about was how hopeless it was. How were we supposed to finish when the only approach was to flawlessly assemble thousands of parts without a single misstep? It was a tedious version of a deranged Atari game with no lives and no continues. Any mistake was fatal.” - × × ×

“A number of people resolved to restart from scratch; they decided to work in pairs to check each other’s work. I was too stubborn to start over and too inexperienced to know what else to try. After getting back to the lab, now half empty because so many people had given up, I resumed staring at my design, as if thinking about it for a third hour would reveal some additional insight. It didn’t. Nor did the fourth hour.” - × × ×

“I proceeded to apply the only tool I had: thinking really hard. That method, previously infallible, now yielded nothing but confusion because the project was too complex to visualize in its entirety. I tried thinking about the parts of the design separately, but that only revealed that the problem was in some interaction between the parts; I could see nothing wrong with each individual component. Thinking about the relationship between pieces was an exercise in frustration, a continual feeling that the solution was just out of reach, as concentrating on one part would push some other critical piece of knowledge out of my head. The following semester I would acquire enough experience in managing complexity and thinking about collections of components as black-box abstractions that I could reason about a design another order of magnitude more complicated without problems – but that was three long winter months of practice away, and this night I was at a loss for how to proceed.” - × × ×