Confirmation bias affects Corporate America and Government Policy, but not science? Talk about confirmation bias :)
A Quick Puzzle to Test Your Problem Solving
221–230 of 311 posts
Re: A Quick Puzzle to Test Your Problem Solving
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
My process was: [3 5 7] [7 5 3] [8 4 2] [5 7 3] [1 2 3] [1 1 1] [0 1 2] At that point I could've done some more to be really certain, but felt confident enough and guessed (correctly).
So you limited yourself to non-negative integers, and had no idea what negative numbers or fractions would do.
Their input on the phone wouldn't allow minus or period characters so I assumed positive integers were the set.
Re: A Quick Puzzle to Test Your Problem Solving
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
[16 32 64] [0 0 0] [1 2 3] [3 2 1] [-1 0 1] [3 5 7] [-2 -1 0] [111 54231 9999999999999999999999] At that point, I correctly answered the question.
Similar to mine, but we both actually failed. Real numbers are accepted and we did not test that.
It accepts floating point numbers. To approximately double precision.
But it accepts zero percent of real numbers.
Re: A Quick Puzzle to Test Your Problem Solving
#224Yup - Dick Cheney!
Re: A Quick Puzzle to Test Your Problem Solving
#225My process was [1, 2, 3], and then I guessed each number is greater than the last.
It was totally a possibility that they wouldn't apply the simplest rule, but I felt it highly unlikely. This "rule" is a meme of the rationality community, especially given the example, so it seemed pretty likely that it was sequential numbers.
Re: A Quick Puzzle to Test Your Problem Solving
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is now the fourth time I've seen this exact rule. Another example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKA4w2O61Xo It's probably not "fair" to say I got it in zero... but I did. :) Now that the NYT has done it, this puzzle has probably attained enough popularity now that you really ought to change it up a bit now if you're going to run it yourself. Granted, the space of hypotheses as simple as "increasing/decreasing…
Similar story here. I got it in zero because this problem shows up at the early part of HPMOR. I suspect that the basic idea behind it is about right (people who insist on failures before committing to a theory will probably do "better"). But it seems to me that this test will be best at selecting people who've seen it before and can pretend they didn't (or even remember to ask negative questions when someone asks yo…
Yeah, I'd like to see other sorts of questions that you can only get right by looking for disconfirming evidence, but that don't have anything to do with choosing a sequence of numbers.
Re: A Quick Puzzle to Test Your Problem Solving
#227Earlier quoted context omitted.
Intersting that the split of correct/wrong answers from the HN crowd is 78%/22% - the exact opposite of the general population : 22% / 78%! The HN community does think different :)
If you're taking that from the article, I think you misread it. > Remarkably, 78 percent of people who have played this game so far have guessed the answer without first hearing a single no. Some of those 78% probably got it right, and some of the remainder would have got it wrong.
Some of those 78% probably got it right...
In what sense? How did they know that e.g. (1, 1, 1) didn't work, unless they tried it?
Re: A Quick Puzzle to Test Your Problem Solving
#228Have large numbers of HN people really not seen this riddle before? Maybe I read weird things.
Re: A Quick Puzzle to Test Your Problem Solving
#229Wish I could have done this with no previous knowledge of the puzzle, I knew it right away because I saw the exact same problem in a Veritasium video.
Re: A Quick Puzzle to Test Your Problem Solving
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you're taking that from the article, I think you misread it. > Remarkably, 78 percent of people who have played this game so far have guessed the answer without first hearing a single no. Some of those 78% probably got it right, and some of the remainder would have got it wrong.
Some of those 78% probably got it right... In what sense? How did they know that e.g. (1, 1, 1) didn't work, unless they tried it?
In the sense that they guessed the rule correctly. The correct answer was the dominant hypothesis in my mind before I tried any sequences, and others here report the same.