[apike]

> be sure to do it strongly in one direction or the other, so that you set the direction of exploration, too.

This reminds me of a game design technique Blizzard learned to use back in the day when balancing their RTS games. Sometimes they'd make a small change – say increasing damage by 4% – and playtest the result. It seemed, maybe better? So they'd ship it. Some time later, they'd realize they had way undershot, and the ideal increase would have been 25%. They sometimes found themselves buffing or nerfing the same thing over and over, trying to get it right.

The approach that worked better for them was to err on the side of first overcorrecting – say, try increasing damage by 40%. This way, in playtesting they could clearly see the effects of having gone too far, then back off the change as appropriate.

[commonlisp94]

This is binary search/bisection.

[daniel_reetz]

Really a great example of this strategy, which also shows up in metrology.

[bemmu]

Sid Meier also wrote the following in his memoir.

One of my big rules has always been, "double it, or cut it in half". Don't waste your time adjusting something by 5 percent, then another 5 percent, then another.. just double it, and see if it even had the effect you thought it was going to have at all.

[PebblesRox]

I’m familiar with this principle as “Alternate your mistakes.”