10th Anniversary of Puzzling SE!

Question

This week Puzzling SE turned 10 years old. Congratulations on asking, answering, voting, and building this community for a whole decade!

Whenever a Stack Exchange site turns 10 we like to celebrate by encouraging users to reflect on their experiences here.

How did you first discover the site? Do you have a favorite puzzle, a particularly ingenious solution, or something that taught you something new about puzzles? Any funny anecdotes or other insights on your time here, that you would like to share? We want to hear it all!

Answer 1

For me, the highlight has been asking/viewing (what I thought were) unrelated questions, only to have them all solved by Rob Pratt and his signature phrase:

The problem can be solved as follows via integer linear programming:

Answer 2

Oh, this is a fun milestone!

What a ride it's been ...

I joined PSE on 13 November 2014, having seen this answer from the HNQ list. This was at the height of the massive spike of activity in the form of many puzzles of questionable quality, also known as the days of the spaghetti parties. In real life, I had unusually much spare time that week, and after being inspired to create my first-ever riddle, I decided to join in with gusto and spend the week (yes, just the week) having fun on Puzzling SE. Little did I know that I'd still be here 10 years later!

The huge increase in activity and decrease in quality led to a dramatic split in the community in Nov-Dec 2014, a period which I refer to as the GPW or Great Puzzling War. The less said about that, the better, but the drama around TMBMP (The Mods' Big Meta Post) dragged me into participating a lot more, in the meta/chat/community side of things as well as just posting Q&A and comments, which was all I'd been doing up to that point on other SE sites.

In 2015, I'd become less active after the dying down of the GPW, when, not entirely by my own choice, I became the site's highest-reputation user, and suddenly felt more pressure to live up to that. Thereafter, my reputation graph tells its own story: spikes of activity punctuating periods of stagnation, while at the same time becoming a highly active user and moderator on other SE sites.

Puzzling will always have a special place in my heart, though, as the site that brought me into an SE community rather than just seeing it as a site to get answers to some questions.

Favourite puzzles, oh wow ... there's so much to choose from. Luckily, I've already sort of answered this on main meta, so I can self-plagiarise from there:

• One of the most significant questions in the site's history (although not a good one, indeed closed as off-topic years ago) was deleted, although it should've been historical-locked. It was far too open-ended to work well as an SE puzzle, but it inspired some incredibly lateral thinking, including using an infinite quantity of rope to create a black hole.

• Some of the answers I worked hardest on were this one about logicians wearing hats and constructing the world's longest self-documenting sentence.

• It's very hard to choose a favourite question, but although I love the clever word puzzles and tricksy maths puzzles, amazing visual puzzles like A well balanced puzzle: Logic puzzle(s) in visual disguise and Red Herring Bonkers In The Red Herring Bunkers and Lepidopterology needed! and Stonehenge - the true purpose have got to take the prize for the "just wow" level of complexity. (Basically any puzzle by Alconja or Avigrail or Bmyguest will almost certainly be awesome.)

• Among comments, I still laugh about this comment on the futility of hunting internet points.

Answer 3

Well, apparently for at least a short time after I answer, I'll be the user who joined the earliest (30, May 2014). Although I didn't answer a question until the end of July, so I wasn't paying a ton of attention right away.

I suspect that like many people at the time, I found it while attempting to get some work done using Stack Overflow.

My favorite puzzle, at least that I answered, was The frog concerto, mostly because of the praise from OP for my answer.

However my absolute favorite thing was when a package showed up at my house with a t-shirt and a thank you from Stack Exchange. (Do they still do that for new sites?)

Answer 4

Backstory

I was already a bit interested in puzzles back then, so I visited several puzzle websites. Then I stumbled upon this in late 2018, spectated, made an account in mid-2019, and started to use the site more after the pandemic's lockdowns took effect.

I was introduced to a variety of interesting puzzles I had never seen before. One of them was the cryptic crossword/cryptic clues genre of puzzles. @Jafe had made many such crosswords before, and me being the clueless newbie that I was always looked at the answers without attempting to solve them. After a while I realized it was an interesting puzzle (since I like wordplay) and wanted to try solving them more. (But I am not an expert - I still have to get to the point where I can solve them without getting aid from the Internet frequently!)

Any lessons learned?

I think the site teaches me one important thing about puzzles: the solution path, which is the path to get to the puzzle's answer, should be unambiguous. The puzzle should be crafted such that there is only one correct way to extract an answer, and all other ways which seem like they lead to the answer will turn out to be clearly wrong. In other words, it should be true that the answer the solver found is correct if and only if their solution path is correct (and equivalently, the answer the solver found is wrong if and only if their solution path is wrong). But of course, in practice, doing this is not easy.

An example of this is my entry for the 2023 PSE Advent Calendar. If you look at @sean47's solution, you'll see that he found the answer to the puzzle but in an unexpected way. But no matter how "absurd" his solution path may seem to me, it doesn't matter since that is absolutely not his fault; the fault is mine. Since the answer he found was clearly correct, then why would his solution path not be? Of course, this thinking is not logical, but it would not be satisfying for a puzzle to have multiple solution paths or multiple answers which are not deliberate. (To be honest I don't know how to justify this further, but I guess that is just how puzzles work, for me at least.)

Conclusion

I'll admit that my passion for puzzles isn't as huge as that of others; nonetheless I still like seeing and solving them, and I don't regret exploring this site.