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A Quick Puzzle to Test Your Problem Solving
11–20 of 311 posts
Re: A Quick Puzzle to Test Your Problem Solving
#12There is no penalty to being told "no". That also applies to "I think I know the answer". There is no penalty for being told "no" there as well, so once you have a reasonable guess why not check it? Disagree with their analysis.
Re: A Quick Puzzle to Test Your Problem Solving
#13There is no penalty to being told "no". That also applies to "I think I know the answer". There is no penalty for being told "no" there as well, so once you have a reasonable guess why not check it? Disagree with their analysis.
There is an implied penalty because it says about the answer box "Make sure you’re right; you won’t get a second chance" in contrast to "You can test as many sequences as you want" about the sequences.
Re: A Quick Puzzle to Test Your Problem Solving
#14I ran this experiment for a while (code at https://github.com/darius/wason, derived from http://lesswrong.com/lw/g2/positive_bias_test_c_program/).
In my logs most people seem to have gotten it right, though presumably that's because it was linked from LessWrong.
For an actually-fun game like this, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zendo_%28game%29.
Re: A Quick Puzzle to Test Your Problem Solving
#15The 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…
Your task is to learn a class of objects by example. Without seeing any negative examples, you're unlikely to learn the right class (which is unique, it is precisely the class of increasing sequences of length 3). (x, 2x, 4x) is not "a correct answer", as it does not describe the class you were supposed to learn to distinguish.
Re: A Quick Puzzle to Test Your Problem Solving
#16The 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…
Well, yes, in this situation random guessing would be very likely to provide an immediate check on the solution.
(1x, 2x, 4x), as indicated in the video below, is not sufficient. It represents a subset of the values that are valid.
Think of it this way. When asked to write a unit test, do you only test the positive outcomes? No, you test to make sure the failures are as you expect as well. Otherwise, you are likely to have what you think is a failure end up as a success.
Re: A Quick Puzzle to Test Your Problem Solving
#17The 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…
> (x, 2x, 4x) gives you a "yes" every time, therefore it is a correct answer
I think this logic is a bit wonky - if there are sequences that get a "yes", but don't match (x, 2x, 4x) then the correct rule cannot be (x, 2x, 4x), can it?
Re: A Quick Puzzle to Test Your Problem Solving
#18I'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.
Hah :)
Seriously, though, it seems a bit of leap from the existence of confirmation bias to explaining away the public outpourings of US Politicians about their financial crises and foreign policy disasters - in the absence of better data as to just why the given statements were made ascribing this to confirmation bias seems itself open to accusations of confirmation bias! :)
Re: A Quick Puzzle to Test Your Problem Solving
#19The 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…
Consider the sequence
1, 3, 5, 7
what comes next? 9 right? Or is the sequence generated by 2n − 1 + (n − 1)(n − 2)(n − 3)(n − 4) for n ∈ N. Then we've got 33.
"among all hypotheses consistent with the observations, the simplest is the most likely"
33 is correct, but it's less likely to be the basis for the generation of the sequence.
Your answer of (x, 2x, 4x) proves the puzzle illustrates the confirmation bias, at least in your case.
Does the unit test that confirms your function returns the expected result given one set of arguments prove it correct?
Re: A Quick Puzzle to Test Your Problem Solving
#20The 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…
It's amusing that you went to a website on confirmation bias, did the puzzle incorrectly, presumably read the material on confirmation bias, but still suffer from the effects of confirmation bias.