> > The challenges that I labelled "super-hard" were:
> >
> > rat in TOA
>
> I think gremlinn and I were both surprised at the amount of trouble people have had with the rat in TOA. The idea was to make the class course challenges all roughly equivalent in difficulty, but clearly more people have had more trouble with the rat than any of the other course puzzles.
>
> What exactly is difficult to figure out about the rat? Once I understood the gist of the puzzle, it took a lot of experimenting to figure out how to chase the thing, and I went around in circles a lot, but I don't remember having any problems understanding what I was supposed to do.
>
> Is it that people don't make a map, maybe? Or that they don't realize they can control where the rat goes? Thoughts?

Well, the first time I tried it, I didn't realized that knocking down the boxes affected how the rat ran. Then, when I got it trapped under the boxes, I just plain didn't know what to do. I caught it solely because I was extremely, extremely lucky.

The second time I tried it, I knew how to get the rat out of that circuit it was running, but then it took me at least five tries to get it from under the boxes. This wouldn't have been so bad, but each time took about a dozen or so turns.

I think what made the rat so much harder than the rest was that you knew a lot less about how much progress you had made. For example, in the jock interview, you could always examine his face. For the one with the mailroom key, you knew what you needed to end up with from the begninning, and that only requred a little fiddling. For the pictures, after you get the ones from the museum, it's only a matter of time before one realizes a likely place for the other one. For the econ class, it's only a matter of time before you have the right amount of stuff, and then, with a small amount of luck, you'll stumble onto the solution. As for Prof. Luna's task, that only requires some fiddling to figure out the quickest route; I got that one in two or three tries my first time. If I've missed any tasks, it's because I've either never played them before, or I've forgotten.

And one more thing that makes the rat thing so hard is that it's very hard to post clear hints on it without spoiling it. Or at least, I find it very hard.