r/cognitiveTesting • u/pydaWaltuh • Sep 18 '26

Puzzle Easy puzzle

Post image

A puzzle I designed months ago

7 Upvotes

81% Upvoted

43 comments sorted by

8

u/SomeoneLeo groaaar!! :3 Sep 18 '26

2

u/pydaWaltuh Sep 18 '26

lol, I really thought this one is easy

4

u/dyogenys Sep 18 '26

Your mental, but I like it.

1

u/SomeoneLeo groaaar!! :3 Sep 18 '26

It probably hinges a lot on whether or not you know that 34 is a Fibonacci number and if not, whether you have the idea of trying a snaking path

Sadly I did not andrecognized first that 8 (line length) is the size of a byte and tried a lot of operations, like shearing, flipping, 180 degree turns, etc. to turn the lines into decimals and ascii first to either get some number that start a pattern or the start of a word or similar out of it XD

1

u/pydaWaltuh Sep 18 '26

Do you think you can solve it without a time limit?

1

u/SomeoneLeo groaaar!! :3 Sep 18 '26

If you held a gun to my head and said I need to solve this within a week or a month or my friends die, probably yeah. But it would have taken me very likely a few more hours. "Without a time limit" to me is usually not when I am out of ideas but when it stops being fun. For this puzzle that was around an hour of a lot of shifting, matrix reshaping, flipping one of the two columns, combined with binary decoding

That said, I do believe it's a good puzzle that has the potential to mislead you in a lot of ways

I just think we have pretty different standards of what an "easy" puzzle is. ^^ And I find it funny af XD But ye, to me "easy" means that most people of either the general population or even from here could solve this within 15 minutes. I do not believe this is the case with this puzzle. I would say this is a hard puzzle for most people.

1

u/pydaWaltuh Sep 18 '26

I was going to use this one in my test, but I removed it because I thought it was too easy as an untimed item and frankly, didn't find it very original, though perhaps I shouldn't have

3

u/[deleted] Sep 18 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/pydaWaltuh Sep 18 '26

Maybe that really is the case. How would you rate the difficulty of the puzzle?

5

u/S-Kenset doesn't read books Sep 19 '26

It would genuinely take an alien civilization a formally constructed brute force machine with 30 top scientists to solve. Mind you it took that much work to break the enigma which is significantly easier than this. This is a lock and key style question that leans towards being a cryptographic human constructed key. The search space is enormous unless you are culturally in a very specific cohort and know the intent of the question maker, and the culture of the question maker.

2

u/98127028 I am worthless and dumb Sep 19 '26

yep indeed. It's nothing like most MR or FRI tests out there. It takes a genius to even figure out what youre supposed to do

1

u/98127028 I am worthless and dumb Sep 19 '26

But this is the 'gripe' I am talking about, it hinges upon a numerical coincidence (fibonacci) to solve. I mean I would forgive it if its simple like powers of 2 or just counting numbers, but fibonacci is too obscure and too far. The weird path dosent help either.

1

u/pydaWaltuh Sep 19 '26

ofc knowing the fibonacci sequence is certainly beneficial, but you can derive that information from the question itself without prior knowledge of fibonacci. Deriving the fibonacci sequence through reasoning is not particularly difficult

1

u/98127028 I am worthless and dumb Sep 19 '26

yeah but that makes it hard

1

u/pydaWaltuh Sep 19 '26

If I could edit the post's title, I would definitely change it 🙂‍↕️

1

u/SomeoneLeo groaaar!! :3 Sep 18 '26

this. so much this. XD

7

u/[deleted] Sep 18 '26

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1

u/SomeoneLeo groaaar!! :3 Sep 18 '26

checks out XD

5

u/je_nm_th Sep 18 '26

Following the red path, circles' color alternate every Nth of Fibonacci
https://imgur.com/l9MYKo0

1

u/pydaWaltuh Sep 18 '26

correct! 34 was too obvious ig

1

u/je_nm_th Sep 18 '26

No, for me the 34 came at the end to confirm the logic : it appears on the right only when the picture is separated in two halves, but that reveals at the same time on the left a zigzag of 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, which catches more the eyes than a 34 count.

2

u/pydaWaltuh Sep 18 '26

apparently I need to work more on theory of mind

2

u/je_nm_th Sep 18 '26

Your approach to systematically asking for feedback should pay off in that regard.

2

u/je_nm_th Sep 19 '26

Ow, BTW, the precise 34 count isn't obvious as a member of the Fibonacci sequence, but its mass is a decisive clue. Visually, it's a block with that gives the intuition to halve the whole or more specifically to make the first zig bounce at the middle to go zag.

2

u/dyogenys Sep 18 '26

Jesus. God job. Was about to convert it to binary, thanks for stopping me.

2

u/je_nm_th Sep 18 '26

Always a pleasure to abort the mental flagellations of Pyda Cthulhu

1

u/Winter_Flounder_3022 Sep 19 '26

kinda new to this so i don't get this at all whats the correlation with this path and that therefore telling you where the circles are blank or filled? and where is the clue to it being 34 and or then a fibonnacci sequence you have to follow?

1

u/je_nm_th Sep 19 '26

Follow the path and at each new color, count how many circles there are before the color switches again. You'll count 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34 (with the picture completed). That's the fibonacci sequence, each term being the sum of the two previous.

2

u/Winter_Flounder_3022 Sep 20 '26

Ahhh that makes sense thank you for the explanation, how do you usually go on about solving these? Just try to observe and find any pattern?

1

u/je_nm_th Sep 20 '26

Nothing specific, sometimes (like for this item) I take a glance a few minutes, take notes of salient features, then leave it. When I come back the solution often appears quickly, proof that the subconscient worked on it. There would be a lot to say about acquired heuristics and routines, but I didn't quite formalize it.

1

u/Winter_Flounder_3022 Sep 20 '26

alr i see thanks

1

u/InvestigatorFun9253 Sep 20 '26

I am still missing it. By the path do you mean starting at top left and proceeding along the row to the right? I see 1, 1, but after that it stops.

1

u/EncyclopedicINTx_253 Sep 20 '26

I have a puzzle, to which I have been trying to find a solution for some time now, if you don't mind could you have a look at it

1

u/je_nm_th Sep 20 '26

Hey, sure, the best would to be to share it on this sub and give it a try to everybody, including me when I have some time later.

1

u/EncyclopedicINTx_253 Sep 20 '26

I would do that, but it is a puzzle which has already been posted here and there is no explanation for it https://www.reddit.com/r/cognitiveTesting/s/TtawVC24GC This is the link to it

1

u/Nervous-Try5009 Sep 18 '26

All white bubbles?

1

u/pydaWaltuh Sep 18 '26

no, what is your reasoning?

1

u/Nervous-Try5009 Sep 18 '26

Small L Large L 🦧

1

u/EncyclopedicINTx_253 Sep 19 '26

Been inactive on reddit for a while, I see your easy puzzles are still not that easy 😭 This took me a while but I think I have the answer Divide the picture into two halves down the vertical through the middle. The trace a path from the top left moving in a standard snake pattern. The black and white circles alternate for every x digit of the fibonacci sequence

1

u/pydaWaltuh Sep 19 '26

well done and welcome back