Here’s a Tactic for Those Pesky LSAT Hybrid Games
While in general on the logic games section, game types can be divided into two categories–grouping and ordering–there are the occasional “hybrid” games. These are the ones that, like mutts, are the sweet little offspring of both.
A hybrid game might look like this:
Over the next week, Miley Cyrus will have three performances, one in Boston, one in New York, and one in Washington, D.C. Her repertoire of dance moves includes twerking, gyrating, shimmying, and lunging. She will perform at least one of these moves during every performance, and every move will be included at least once. Her performances meet the following conditions:
She performs in New York sometime before Boston.
Her New York performance includes at least three dance moves.
She doesn’t lunge when she twerks.
Do you recognize why this is a hybrid game? Think about it before reading on.
It’s because it combines ordering of the performances and grouping of dance moves.
Let’s begin by notating our possible orders for the game given that NY must come before Boston:
Option 1: NY – Boston – DC
Option 2: NY – DC – Boston
Option 3: DC – NY – Boston
Now can we incorporate grouping rules onto this diagram? Well, one rule we can: New York has to have at least 3 dance moves. So we know wherever NY ends up, it’ll have at least 3 moves in it:
Option 1: NY (3+) – Boston – DC
Option 2: NY (3+) – DC – Boston
Option 3: DC – NY (3+) – Boston
But what about the T and L rule? We need to notate that they can’t go together, but we’ll have a hard time writing that into this diagram because we don’t know where either of them is going to go. Of course, we could just jot the rule down alongside. But there’s a potentially more useful way to notate both the rule and the inferences it allows. This is where the playing card strategy comes in handy.
When I’m dealing with a grouping rule or rules on a hybrid game and I want to notate them but there isn’t a way to do so on the ordering diagram I’ve already got, I like to create playing cards. Each card represents the elements that I know will be in that group. But here’s the key–just like playing cards, we can shuffle them around all we want. In other words, I’m not worrying about the cities at all. I’m just worrying about clumps of dance moves. We’re going to have 3 cards because we have 3 cities:
Playing Card 1: ?
Playing Card 2: ?
Playing Card 3: ?
Again, remember that the numbers 1, 2, and 3 don’t mean anything. We’re not ordering them. We’re just putting things in groups.
Since T and L can’t go together but both have to be used, we’re going to have a playing card for each of them:
Playing Card 1: T
Playing Card 2: L
Playing Card 3: ?
We have S and G left. Could they both go in playing card one? Sure. Add two slots:
Playing Card 1: T ___ ___ (could have S and G, but not L)
How about playing card 2? Sure, same thing:
Playing Card 2: L ___ ___ (could have S and G, but not T)
What’s up with card 3? Well, all we know is that we can’t have all 4, because of the same T and L rule. So the most we can have in card 3 is 3 slots (S, G, and T or L):
Playing Card 3: ___ ___ ___
Now that we have these cards, we can use them to assign to cities according to the conditions that the questions give us.
To practice this strategy on a real game, check out PT 44, S3, G2.