Having read the article as well, I'm partially wondering how much this would differ from a study that found that, say, Native born French speaking people are more likely to use Firefox and the like.
That is, I'm beginning to think of puzzle speed as a language, rather as math is considered a language, etc.
First of all, a short version of this, for people who don't want to read the long story below: I've been doing puzzles my whole life, and so when I started doing kenkens, it was the same as speaking English to me, and that, more than anything else, is why I feel I can do them quickly relatively speaking.
For me, one of my oldest memories (Which, technically, isn't very long ago. A little under 12 years, but still) is of a trip my family took to Europe, when I had just turned 7. I don't remember much of that trip at all. I remember going to Rodin's Gardens, solely because of the Thinker; I remember the Eiffel Tower because when it lights up it's so pretty; I remember Mount Pilatus, and how beautiful Lucerne was; I remember the Trevi Fountain, and the Galleria Dell'Academia, and the canals and stained glass of Venice.
But as much as any of that, I remember what I did on the trains between cities; I worked puzzles. Nothing difficult, no Kakuros with a 45 row, no 16x16 Kenkens, etc. More along the lines of
http://www.jimloy.com/puzz/mensa.htm. Just very basic number puzzles.
Then, fast forward to 6th grade (At which point I would have been 11), at which point I was still doing number puzzles, though the math involved had gotten slightly heavier. I started Middle School, and for the first time got to participate in Math Team. Math Team, for clarification, is effectively a bunch of number puzzles, generally more complex than the earlier ones, but still not immensely complex.
The highest level of it, as far as I'm aware, is the type of competition that this site sprung from; Limited by my school's travel resources, I never got up to that level, though I was at least competitive against the people who did take the USAMO and were at the national level, and that was only in terms of difficulty. In terms of pure speed, I was faster than any of them because all of their knowledge had been taught, whereas all of mine had been learned. As a result, at the two speed oriented competitions, I beat them every single time I knew how to do the problem.
Meanwhile, while still doing math team, since math team runs middle school through high school (When I was 11 to when I was 18), when I was 14, my dad started keeping a Kakuro book with him in his car. I had done a few (Probably around 500 or so, don't underestimate this number) Sudoku in the past, but had worn out on them because they're extremely limited as to what you can do with them. I still work them from time to time, but I just don't find them entertaining enough. So from when I was 14 to about when I turned 16, my dad and I would occasionally just take some free time to work a Kakuro puzzle. This usually was when it wasn't useful to drive home after church and drive back, and the like.
When I turned 16, my Dad and I no longer had reason to spend that time working Kakuro together, since I could drive to church on my own. So I started working more of them on my own.
Then, of course, I discovered this site as I was getting bored with Kakuro, and I've been doing Kenken's ever since.
All this time, of course, corresponds to the approximate timing of my critical period (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_period). Basically, in a large percentage of cases, people who learn second languages during this time frame are more likely to gain a fluent state.
Similarly, sheldolina, as she was 13 as of the last time she mentioned her age, likely learned how to do puzzles during her critical period.
As a result, the two of us seem to speak the language fluently, as opposed to just recognizing phrases as they come at us.
But basically, to me, puzzles like this don't register as a puzzle, it registers as a language. It's the same concept as
http://www.chessblog.com/2012/01/classi ... rtise.html, where chess grandmasters see a board as a sentence; They have no trouble repeating a sentence back to you, but a random set of words is difficult.
I remember a little while back, someone saying that a little thing you could do with these puzzles was try and turn the monitor off and do them. This is the same type thing as the chess experiment, and it comes fairly natural to me for easier puzzles, because typically, it's like remembering a sentence. However, for the very easiest ones, the ones that are addition only, it becomes more difficult -- almost like remembering a sentence like "I am tired and so I will sleep." Every word makes sense, but none of the words are interesting, and so it becomes harder to remember precisely than a sentence with more complex thoughts in it.
As for the actual article, as a Firefox user, I'm actually surprised to see that the gap between Firefox and IE is so small.
Also, oddly, I think that helps the argument that Chrome's success over Firefox is not simply the result of ages of solvers, since a least 1/2 of the two examples of age helping people excel at this use Firefox.
So yeah, to anyone who read all the way through this, sorry for rambling a bit; I just had an odd realization about how the puzzle language works.