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A Quick Puzzle to Test Your Problem Solving
101–110 of 311 posts
Re: A Quick Puzzle to Test Your Problem Solving
#102I'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…
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Re: A Quick Puzzle to Test Your Problem Solving
#103I'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…
Guessed after just one "No"
3 9 27 yes (is it exponential series?)
4 16 64 yes (is it only odd numbers?)
5 7 9 yes (is it any numbers of the same parity?)
6 7 8 yes (is it any set of increasing numbers?)
6 7 6 no (just to confirm that it's xRe: A Quick Puzzle to Test Your Problem Solving
#104The puzzle is not nearly as interesting as the code being able to understand my answer! My answer: The numbers increase from left to right Application response: As you seem to have guessed, the answer was extremely basic
Yes, I'm curious what heuristics it used there.
Playing the confirmation bias game on "playthroughs of the confirmation bias game": it looks like you get that message if you have a 'no' answer, and the word 'increasing' in your guess. ("Increasing by the same amount" is still accepted.) I wouldn't be surprised if other words also count.
Edit: the words '', 'increas', 'big' and 'larger' seem to count. Looks like they're accepted as substrings, not just words - so 'increase' and 'increasing' are accepted. I could look for a long time, so I'm giving up now.
Re: A Quick Puzzle to Test Your Problem Solving
#105The 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 not an assumption; the article tells you up front that there is one correct answer.
It is an analog for how science works. When it comes to a natural phenomenon, humans can come up with multiple explanations that fit a given set of observations, but presumably (I mean, this is a basic tenet of science) nature only works in one consistent way.
Thus, the importance of a falsifying test. You form a hypothesis based on the initial observations (in this case, the number sequence 2, 4, 8), and then you propose a test that could falsify your hypothesis.
The trick is that a hypothesis can fail in several ways. It can be outright wrong, like saying "the rule is that the numbers decrease from left to right." That's obviously just wrong.
But it can also be too specific, like saying "the rule is that the exponent increments by one with each step to the right." That matches the given evidence, and tests with other base numbers will succeed too. But it's over-fitting.
Here's a concrete example: a man wearing a red shirt drops a weight and measures gravitational acceleration as 9.8 m/s^2. So he formulates a hypothesis that gravity always produces an acceleration of 9.8 m/s^2 in the presence of a red shirt.
And if he always wears a red shirt, and always tests gravity on the surface of the Earth, he'll always find supporting evidence for that hypothesis.
But of course we know that gravitational acceleration varies depending on mass and distance, and that it's the same no matter what color your shirt is. But he would only find that out if he varied his experiment beyond what his hypothesis predicts.
Re: A Quick Puzzle to Test Your Problem Solving
#106I'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.
I was just writing this out! I believe practice in unit testing is what let me get this question right. I almost submitted n^1, n^2, n^3 before I realized I didn't get any wrong answers and something didn't feel right. I credit this 'instinct' to having written thousands of tests, and trying to make them fail to make sure my tests weren't lying to me.
Re: A Quick Puzzle to Test Your Problem Solving
#107I'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…
Guessed after just one "No" 3 9 27 yes (is it exponential series?) 4 16 64 yes (is it only odd numbers?) 5 7 9 yes (is it any numbers of the same parity?) 6 7 8 yes (is it any set of increasing numbers?) 6 7 6 no (just to confirm that it's x
-2 -4 -8 (is it increasing distance from zero?)
Re: A Quick Puzzle to Test Your Problem Solving
#108function judgeSentence(sentence, numNo) var probablyWrong = ["doubl", "expon", "multipl", "^", " ", "power", "two", "2", "twice", "as big", "nth", "rais"]; var seemsRight = ["larger", "increas", "greater", "small", "less", "big", ">", " Been expecting something more interesting than that
include "monoton" in probablyWrong.
The sequence is not monotonically increasing.
Re: A Quick Puzzle to Test Your Problem Solving
#109Re: A Quick Puzzle to Test Your Problem Solving
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
Guessed after just one "No" 3 9 27 yes (is it exponential series?) 4 16 64 yes (is it only odd numbers?) 5 7 9 yes (is it any numbers of the same parity?) 6 7 8 yes (is it any set of increasing numbers?) 6 7 6 no (just to confirm that it's x
-2 -4 -8 (is it increasing distance from zero?)
You're right, I made the assumption that our domain was natural numbers- which seems to be an uncommon one so far among the HN crowd