While eating my lunch at the park last fall, I looked down at the wooden deck below me, and noticed that an ant had picked up a large crumb from my sandwich. The crumb was heavy, and the ant labored to move it. Unfortunately, the gap between the deck planks was too wide for the ant to cross while toting his new-found feast.

The problem is that the ant didn’t have perspective on the problem. He couldn’t look down the length of the gap to see if there was a narrow spot, so he was forced to experiment, one step at a time.

It was a practical approach to problem solving—a methodical one-factor-at-a-time (OFAT) effort that was necessary given the ant’s physical limitations, but certainly not very efficient.

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