Top Law Schools

Hey guys!

After studying during the summer and doing practically nothing all fall, I'm coming back to LG now trying to reevaluate my technique and figure out what to do to make my gamesmanship more efficient.

I'm looking at linear games right now (though I'm sure it applies to all games), and I'm trying to perfect my initial setup. When I'm looking at a particular game, how deep into inferences should I go? I currently list all the contrapositives of conditionals, I list conditional chains, and I try to eliminate spaces for particular variables (i.e. for the rule A_D, I write ¬D on the first two spaces and ¬A on the last two). Beyond the basics, how deep should I go into inference making? I want to make sure I get the information I need to solve each problem on the page without wasting time writing down ultimately useless information. Is there a way to figure this out quickly? Or should I just list every single inference possible while working through?

Thanks for the help

Also, with regards to the "Identify Method" in the LG Bible, is there anyway to...ummm...identify when to employ this method? Obviously having one or more restricted spaces is a good indicator, but are there any other key signs to decide when its worth the time to write out all possibilities?

Personally, I only made one or two inferences and then went to work on the questions. If something else needed to be inferred, I generally just tried to do it quickly in my head and it worked out well for me (-1 on LG on actual test). There's no need to make more than two or three extra inferences after diagramming the question's given information.

One instance in which I diagram all the possibilities is in what I call a Distribution Game. A Distribution Game is one in which it is not clear how the elements are distributed. For example, if 4 fishermen caught a total of 8 fish but you are not told how many fish each fisherman caught. Now I won't just write out all the possibilities, but if I get a clue that says, for example, that fisherman A caught twice as many fish as fisherman B, then I will draw out how that could actually work - 1 for A and 2 for B, or 2 for A and 4 for B. In a Distribution game, there will usually be questions that ask directly about the distribution (e.g. what is the maximum number of fish that fisherman B could catch?) I find that mapping this beforehand allows me to do these questions very quickly.

Another type of deduction that I really like are placeholders. For example, if there are 3 shelves, and 9 books to place on those shelves, 3 per shelf, you could run into clues that say "Book A and Book B are never on the same shelf", "Books B and C are not on the same shelf" and "Books A and C are not on the same shelf." Rather than just leave all those clues sitting there individually, I go ahead and diagram a placeholder on each shelf. There will be one spot guaranteed to be a/b/c on each. So each shelf column will have one space marked a/b/c. This goes a long way in visually seeing when shelves are full (e.g. When a question begins with 'if D and E are both on shelf 2...', then you know that will fill up shelf 2 as the 3rd place on shelf 2 is held for a/b/c. I also do this when there are only 2 groups in a game. For example, if there are 2 boats to hold 8 people, 4 people to a boat, and a clue says that A and B are not on the same boat, I go ahead and place an a/b placeholder in each boat.

Lastly, here's a tip. Call it the "rule of 3". If you ever think it's a good idea to diagram all the possibilities, and there are more than 3 possibilities, don't do it. You're missing something. Diagramming more than 3 possiblities will inevitably take too long.