A Quick Puzzle to Test Your Problem Solving
nytimes.com
A Quick Puzzle to Test Your Problem Solving
1–10 of 311 posts
Re: A Quick Puzzle to Test Your Problem Solving
#2Wonder how many people here immediately knew what the rule was?
This is the standard example of to right way to test a hypothesis/theory and the power of Confirmation Bias, testing sequences that are invalid under the theory instead of testing what you think is correct.
Re: A Quick Puzzle to Test Your Problem Solving
#3I'm curious to see more about the distribution of questions and answers people had, and how the HN population may differ from the NYT's. There will certainly be self selection bias here, but if you're willing to share how you did with others, please enter it here:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/17e5BIL0lH8OHsGj89Zdtdl8GeCV...
The result summary is visible here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/17e5BIL0lH8OHsGj89Zdtdl8GeCV...
The raw answers are visible here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ZxR2_eOUtNLXwgKfLO1J...
Re: A Quick Puzzle to Test Your Problem Solving
#4Derek Muller of Veritasium has done this test over a year ago on people in one of his videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKA4w2O61Xo
I've given the test to various people since then and never once came across someone who'd guess it right away, or within a short period of time. The breaking time came usually after a few minutes when they gave up and started throwing out random numbers that coincidentally did not meet the rule. Once you hit the first "No", it took a very short time to figure out the rule for almost everyone.
Re: A Quick Puzzle to Test Your Problem Solving
#5[deleted]
Re: A Quick Puzzle to Test Your Problem Solving
#6The official answer to this puzzle makes a huge assumption: that there is one correct answer. There is not one correct answer. (x, 2x, 4x) gives you a "yes" every time, therefore it is a correct answer, at least as automatically checkable, and there's an infinite number of such tuples. To find a "no" you're reduced to random guessing. That's not a puzzle, that's crap. The confirmation bias material might be true, but the puzzle does not illustrate it.
Re: A Quick Puzzle to Test Your Problem Solving
#7It responds "No" to (10000000000000000, 10000000000000001, 10000000000000002) so the rule is not so simple after all :)
Re: A Quick Puzzle to Test Your Problem Solving
#8I'm curious to see more about the distribution of questions and answers people had, and how the HN population may differ from the NYT's. There will certainly be self selection bias here, but if you're willing to share how you did with others, please enter it here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/17e5BIL0lH8OHsGj89Zdtdl8GeCV... The result summary is visible here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/17e5BIL0lH8OHsGj89Zdtdl…
Cool idea, thanks!
Personally, I spent most of my answers playing with the inputs. The form was happy to report that "1e1, 15, 0x10" was a valid sequence. :D
Re: A Quick Puzzle to Test Your Problem Solving
#9The official answer to this puzzle makes a huge assumption: that there is one correct answer. There is not one correct answer. (x, 2x, 4x) gives you a "yes" every time, therefore it is a correct answer, at least as automatically checkable, and there's an infinite number of such tuples. To find a "no" you're reduced to random guessing. That's not a puzzle, that's crap. The confirmation bias material might be true, but…
The puzzle is not "Find a rule that matches everything you tested". It's figure out what rule they are using. It may be true that there are multiple ways to state the rule, such as "x_2 >= x_1 + 1 and x_3 is >= x_1 + 2" but they are equivalent.
Try the sequence: 0,0,0. It would give "yes" for (x,2x,4x), but the actual rule gives it "no".
Re: A Quick Puzzle to Test Your Problem Solving
#10I'm curious to see more about the distribution of questions and answers people had, and how the HN population may differ from the NYT's. There will certainly be self selection bias here, but if you're willing to share how you did with others, please enter it here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/17e5BIL0lH8OHsGj89Zdtdl8GeCV... The result summary is visible here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/17e5BIL0lH8OHsGj89Zdtdl…
People familiar with unit testing and test driven development will feel at home with this kind of puzzle. That doesn't mean that they will be less biased in social/political decisions, it just means that this test will fail to prove a point.