What if you don’t have paper and pencil, though? A messy resistor network has to be solved as a system of linear equations, which involves a lot of pencil on paper action, especially if you want results to be accurate to n decimal figures. With a pretty huge failure rate too. And the failures here can give you results that are orders of magnitude off; very bad thing as far as survival is concerned.
At the same time, if you had a little bit of training via observing computer simulator of resistor networks, and you have the resistances presented in some graphical form (e.g. as lines of different thickness corresponding to conductivity; think painted conductive ink resistors), you may be able to learn to just imagine the current flows and see the approximate answer with not such a bad accuracy. Brain is good at training itself to match some rules. I can do mechanics pretty well by mental imagery (and electronics not too badly).
When you are trying to design a circuit, or to invent something, you need very quick and dirty evaluation method, that you can run backwards when you need a circuit for a task. (Then you need to find the values accurately using paper and pencil).
What if you don’t have paper and pencil, though? A messy resistor network has to be solved as a system of linear equations, which involves a lot of pencil on paper action, especially if you want results to be accurate to n decimal figures. With a pretty huge failure rate too. And the failures here can give you results that are orders of magnitude off; very bad thing as far as survival is concerned.
At the same time, if you had a little bit of training via observing computer simulator of resistor networks, and you have the resistances presented in some graphical form (e.g. as lines of different thickness corresponding to conductivity; think painted conductive ink resistors), you may be able to learn to just imagine the current flows and see the approximate answer with not such a bad accuracy. Brain is good at training itself to match some rules. I can do mechanics pretty well by mental imagery (and electronics not too badly).
When you are trying to design a circuit, or to invent something, you need very quick and dirty evaluation method, that you can run backwards when you need a circuit for a task. (Then you need to find the values accurately using paper and pencil).