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A Quick Puzzle to Test Your Problem Solving

nytimes.com

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Re: A Quick Puzzle to Test Your Problem Solving

#31

Post by mikehawkins »

Kenji wrote: post #26

"We’ve chosen a rule that some sequences of three numbers obey — and some do not. Your job is to guess what the rule is." My mistake was to assume that choosing the first number uniquely defines the next ones in the sequence. Since, you know, like all the sequence puzzles I've seen before worked like that, and I didn't read it rigorously enough. Oh, by the way, the doubling thing is wrong if you use negative numbers…

Same here - I was also guilty of feeling a bit clever and avoiding the obvious "oh, the numbers double every time" answer. So, when I found out that if the spelling of each number was one letter longer (4 = four letters, 8 = five letters, 11 = six) I got smug, and didn't bother testing further.

Good article - and a humbling experience. :)

Re: A Quick Puzzle to Test Your Problem Solving

#32

Post by [deleted] »

Kenji wrote: post #26

"We’ve chosen a rule that some sequences of three numbers obey — and some do not. Your job is to guess what the rule is." My mistake was to assume that choosing the first number uniquely defines the next ones in the sequence. Since, you know, like all the sequence puzzles I've seen before worked like that, and I didn't read it rigorously enough. Oh, by the way, the doubling thing is wrong if you use negative numbers…

[deleted]

Re: A Quick Puzzle to Test Your Problem Solving

#33

Post by progmanal »

The attached reading material is interesting, but this question is too similar to problems where you guess the next one in the sequence and none are missing.

A rule where the numbers are increasing does not explain why 3 or 5 or 6 is missing from the sequence in that version of the question that is much more common.

Re: A Quick Puzzle to Test Your Problem Solving

#35

Post by [deleted] »

Kenji wrote: post #26

"We’ve chosen a rule that some sequences of three numbers obey — and some do not. Your job is to guess what the rule is." My mistake was to assume that choosing the first number uniquely defines the next ones in the sequence. Since, you know, like all the sequence puzzles I've seen before worked like that, and I didn't read it rigorously enough. Oh, by the way, the doubling thing is wrong if you use negative numbers…

[deleted]

Re: A Quick Puzzle to Test Your Problem Solving

#36

Post by [deleted] »

725686 wrote: post #29

That page prints the nyt logo in the javacript console (will probably look messed up here): 0000000 000 0000000 111111111 11111111100 000 111111111 00000 111111111111111111 00000 000000 000 1111111111111111111111111100000 000 000 1111 1111111111111111100 000 000 11 0 1111111100 000 000 1 00 1 000 000 00 00 1 000 000 000 00000 1 000 00000 0000 00000000 1 00000 11111 000 00 000000 000 11111 00000 0000 000000 00000 0000…

[deleted]

Re: A Quick Puzzle to Test Your Problem Solving

#37

Post by asQuirreL »

bediger4000 wrote: post #6

The 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…

From a Computational Learning Theory perspective, we are faced with an infinite hypothesis space, with an infinite VC dimension. So yes, there's not much strategy that can be employed here.

But, the fact that there is one correct answer is not really an assumption that the puzzle makes, it is information we have been given:

> We've chosen a rule that some sequences of three numbers obey -- and some do not.

This simply means that the solution is realisable. No matter how many ways (in English) we have to describe that solution it is still the same solution.

Re: A Quick Puzzle to Test Your Problem Solving

#38

Post by TeMPOraL »

abecedarius wrote: post #14

I 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 .

> though presumably that's because it was linked from LessWrong

No surprise there, given that this experiment is discussed in Sequences, the link to the post present in the article you link to :).

Re: A Quick Puzzle to Test Your Problem Solving

#39

Post by rm999 »

[deleted] wrote: post #11

[deleted]

>In order to prove their point effectively without falling in the same trap they are pointing, they should conduct the same experiment with a random example each time, not one especially created to mislead the experimentee.

This is the point though - we all have preexisting beliefs, and we often don't critically question those beliefs. The [x,2x,4x] pattern injected into our minds by nytimes is playing the part of the preexisting belief. The fact that most people go forward with their theory without properly testing it is the confirmation bias. Totally randomizing the numbers wouldn't be able to make this point because three random numbers usually won't have a clear looking pattern (and hence wouldn't give us an obvious preexisting belief).

> In such problems, it provides more information to test your hypothesis with data matching your hypothesis than with data not matching it.

I'd argue this is often not the case. For example, in the article's Iraq example, looking for evidence that there were no WMDs would have cost very little compared to even a short war. Instead, Bush's administration searched for positive evidence anywhere they could, even from questionable sources.

Re: A Quick Puzzle to Test Your Problem Solving

#40

Post by TeMPOraL »

cabirum wrote: post #23

function 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

It's surprising how far you can go by such heuristics. I run an IRC bot that uses matches like this (I'm working on a proper solution right now though) to parse natural language queries and I managed to trick few people into thinking they're talking with human. As long as it's ok for 90% of most common cases, people often won't notice.
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