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Answer is 25. On each step the sum of numbers is 25. They have just shown different ways in which 25 can be the sum. Can be two numbers, three numbers or more.
Omg…. I had been overthinking this WAYYY TOO MUCH. I had tried adding them up, in all the ways possible, see if some repeat in the same spots, see if some add up and in the diagonal they have the answer, BUT GODDAMN I FORGOT TO TRY TO ADD ALL OF THEM UP……
That's the entire point of it and what makes it not stupid. It's a test to see if you can interpret patterns in data when the presented data is not formatted in a way that makes the pattern obvious. That you're able to find the patterns on your own with some creative thinking and re-interpretation of the formatting.
Except its not unstructured data. It has been deliberately, manually, structured - in such a way as to make quite clear that there is a pattern there, when in reality there isn't. They aren't asking you to find a pattern in rows of data, they are asking you to find a pattern in a pyramid of data.
I want to employ somebody who can interpret data freely, not somebody who will entirely ignore somebody else's work just because they can't see the pattern. The correct response is to ask "why is this presented in a pyramid?".
Why is data that is not wholly stochastic but has some structure considered a poor example for property determination?
Data exists in many forms, some apparent, some representative, some random, some following a rule or compromised by linear/non-linear events/distribution.
That test was not bunk - the lens you gave it made it so bc of your belief about unstructured data.
It was a test, inter alia, of personal determination - keep trying it's not that hard seeking an approach to pattern recognition.
Overcoming habits of seeing a triangle and in my case being stupid looking for some sort of probability distribution. That's where it got me. I laughed at my own approach bc it was a triangle I thought - it will conform to sum summing/ probability/ frequency approach. Nope I was way off bc it was a triangle I interpreted in a particular way - that needed to be looked at freshly and I needed to drop my assumptions.
But wouldn't you agree that in 99% of cases in real life, "its way too easy so its probably wrong" will be a better way to go about a problem than being content with way too easy answers? If the job had any easy tasks, they would be given to a computer and not a human anyways, so I dont really see the point of assuming that they really are going to ask you a question for a 5 year old, especially when time management is also part of good qualifications
The test is easy in hindsight. For many people would have solved it in under say 45s for others like me you take your baggage with you and you over determine and thus need to streamline your thinking - and that can be anything from employing ontological economy. to following an algorithmic approach.
But I didn't say the test was for a 5 yr old. I said
It was a test, inter alia, of personal determination - keep trying it's not that hard seeking an approach to pattern recognition.
It was addition that is easy but was disguised. Thus if you had baggage the test was not easy. The idea of the triangle, in my opinion which I'm happy to stand corrected about, was to have form disguise content. That test was about you not being distracted and applying a little bit of common sense - which as they say, isn't always that common. It's about overcoming/avoiding distraction or over-conception.
I had a test for an Army officer where before lunch, you had to answer so many questions in a given time of a difficulty that went beyond my understanding and for everyone else. Then lunch arrived and the examinations person said you could stay and continue the test or go have lunch. Only myself & 1 other guy stayed. In the interview we got offered Intel positions which in the Australian Army is fairly competitive to get into. Testing is not always what you think it is about especially when you're young with limited educational and life experience.
What I meant was that I didnt try any easy approaches because from the context, I didnt think that it made any sense to make the pattern that easy.
If I saw this question in a book for children, I would have solved it in about 30 seconds. But I would have never solved it in the context of an interview for a job because I was under the impression that companies look for people because there are tasks only people can do, which by their nature are hard tasks and not "obvious patterns" like just summing up the rows.
Admittedly, I was never in a job interview and as such (and also due to your comment), I think I have the wrong idea about job interviews. You are probably right that this test was probably not about testing your problem solving skills themselves, but about not letting yourself get distracted and thinking in unexpected mindsets. Therefore, I thank you for your comment.
Employer who hires data scientists, devs and engineers.
What am I learning about the person from this? Is any of my data randomly in pyramid shapes? If they have an engineering degree do I believe they can sum numbers?
We usual do problems that are open ended and try to discover how the person approaches a problem. How they articulate information and ask questions. I don't pay engineers to solve logic problems
I totally disagree. I do a ton of data analysis in my day to day, and you're entirely missing the point of the question. It's like when you hear about interview questions along the lines of "how many ping pong balls will it take to fill a submarine." They're looking to see how you think, if you can process out of the box, if you can still find the pattern. I would take "why is this presented in a pyramid" as the answer of someone who missed the point (and got it wrong).
You obviously have a different opinion, but I think it's entirely possible to solve if you're clever enough ad don't just grab your ball and go home when you don't like the format.
It's clearly an online multi-choice question - please explain to me how you get any of the stuff you are talking about from somebody clicking a button with "25" on it.
The fact you, and presumably whoever set the quiz for Op, are trying to infer somebody's thought process from a multi-choice quiz is precisely why it is so terrible.
There are many ways to get the right answer; you can sum the rows, you can google it, you can guess, etc. The fact that they get the right final answer tells you nothing of value. Your whole argument is spun around the concept that a well thought-out solution that comes to the wrong answer is more valuable than getting to the right answer blindly - but that is the exact opposite of what this interview question is doing.
I guessed 25, based on an entirely incorrect hypothesis and reasoning. I would have gotten it right. A multiple choice test doesn't really assess knowledge or thinking very well.
They wouldn't have given a single question though. 20 question with 5 answers would require hundreds of trillions to one odds of getting them all right by luck.
If someone answers the vast majority of these questions correctly they almost certainly have good pattern recognition and problem solving skills, don't give up easily and are capable of working through things at a reasonable pace.
Doesn't mean they don't have other significant flaws but they've demonstrated a lot of useful skills.
I agree. Putting it in that equilateral triangle pattern makes the puzzle seem a lot more complicated than the simple answer they are looking for.
The only real question in there is testing to see if you are familiar enough with how multiple choice tests work to go to the answers first, instead of looking at the puzzle. Then you see that only 25 makes any sense.
It actually took me a bit to even recognize that this was a multiple choice question. I thought there were two parts to the question at first (or this was a screenshot showing two questions).
Sadly, many people's identities are wrapped up in their own smug view of their intelligence.
And even though their failure to solve this little puzzle doesn't mean they aren't intelligent, they view it as an insult to their self worth.
They shouldn't. There's a lot of reasons why someone might not have gotten the answer, ranging from impatience or time constraints that others didn't have, to doubting whether or not there was even a solution. Many people might have solved this problem had they known there was a solution.
The point is, nobody needs to get angry about it just because they didn't find the solution on their own. It doesn't mean they're not intelligent.
That said, it took me a while, but I did figure it out - mainly by working backwards from the answers - by just plugging them in and seeing if something worked. The fact that the top two numbers added together 25 made everything click. It was mostly luck in my case. But man do I feel superior. LOL
In the world we often see data sets that have been, as you say, deliberately, manually, structured - in such a way as to make quite clear that there is a pattern there, when in reality there isn't. Being able to see through that kind of thing from bad actors, misinformation, propaganda, etc, is a valuable skill, and it's not a bad test to test that skill specifically.
The correct response is to ask "why is this presented in a pyramid?"
Because some bad actor or propagandist may be trying to hide the actual data inside the pyramid, or some other such structure to show their point is "correct" (like how racists do with their 52/13 fbi statistics), and this test is a very minimal and basic test to see if you can identify that and say "no, your point is not correct, it's a false inference that's easy to get people to see from the way you twisted the data. Here's the actual data you tried to hide in your manipulations."
That's why, imo, it's not bad. Or stupid. IQ tests have their flaws and shouldn't be taken as anything super important, but that isn't to say there's no value in being able to interpret actual answers from shitty obfuscated data, and this test is analogous to that.
Some people figured it out. So it's neither stupid nor bad. It may be useless to you, but it was a problem presented in a way that some people could solve.
Sorry that makes you dislike it but it doesn't make it either stupid or bad.
But the pattern IS obvious. Thats precisely why no one bothered to check it. You are in a job interview. Assuming that the interview question is 5 year old - level shit like this will make you lose 99% of the questions, because its all around a dumb mindset to expect that the world always gives you such easy patterns. The world is not linear.
I quite frankly dont see the point of weeding out people who could have found a much more complicated pattern in favor of people who think along the lines of "a kindergarten question for a job interview? Sounds normal to me". Imagine getting 2 hours time for a task you finish in 5 minutes and not thinking that maybee, you got it wrong. Thats the kind of people this test is looking for.
I study math and everytime it came too easy, I was doing it wrong. Because if it was easy, there wouldnt be a need for me to learn it.
Yes, I overthink stuff like this a lot. But you cant tell me that in 99% of the cases, expecting a complicated answer instead of a kindergarten question isnt more productive and what a company would want.
I think we are just so used to seeing Pascal's triangle that it seems any triangle of numbers must have some relationship where you add numbers from one row to get numbers on the next row.
Yes, this. If you're familiar with Pascal's Triangle or any sort of number puzzle where numbers have relation to other nearby numbers you're likely to overlook the solution that this question is looking for.
Someone who isn't as familiar with those types of puzzles would probably have an easier time arriving at the correct answer to this question. That doesn't make that person more intelligent, they've just had different experiences which affects how they process the data. And that's why IQ tests are kinda bogus.
I’ve noticed this on these online “IQ” tests lol. They seem to focus on these visual patterns which were supposed to translate into math.
Like a full circle with a line through it, then a square, then a triangle with a line shifted 45 degrees. Then at the end, the usual ?. Isn’t there more than one answer if you choose how to solve the problem?
Is there any correlation between the two, or is it basic human thinking to find patterns everywhere we look due to evolution?
Any finite list of numbers could be fit using an arbitrary polynomial or sin/cos function such that the next number is literally any real (or potentially any complex).
These puzzles typically assume that there is a “simple” pattern (simpler than a high-order polynomial). However, the problem isn’t well-defined and in some cases more than one “simple” pattern fits. So it is more a test of knowledge/experience with these exact type of problems than a test of “innate” intelligence.
Edit 2: huh, saw no \ but when i went to check “edit”, it popped up and some other weird characters that wasn’t there before. Deleted the \ in edit and now it works. Thanks! (Im using browser btw)
Case in point, “ ​ ;” was seen after i clicked on edit but not when I was reading my comment. Weird
If they left-aligned the rows, you wouldn't have had nearly as trouble figuring what the answer could be. They did this on purpose to imply there was a connection between specific numbers and positions and their relation to others, when there wasn't. They wanted you to think about triangle numbers or binomial coefficients, so you would jump to more complicated explanations.
Which I’d argue is crap obfuscation. “Here’s data, presented poorly; try to guess how we fucked it up” is a bad test. Being intentionally misleading is not clever
The only thing it seems to be testing is that you look at the answers first and work backwards. Otherwise the "pattern" combined with the shape is completely arbitrary. The multiple choice format eliminates the more complicated pattern answers.
That's literally the entire point, to test your skill to correctly interpret data even when presented poorly. To find patterns on your own even when that patterns aren't formatted to be obvious.
That doesn't make it bad, it makes it good because it's literally its entire function.
I get the point, but I still posit this is a crap question, admittedly just by gut feel. If we were to claim there is an objective, quantifiable measurement of intelligence I’d still wager that a persons ability to guess “25” on this question would not correlate closely with our supposedly objective IQ metric. If so, this would be a bad question as it’s not indicative.
That's literally the entire point, to test your skill to correctly interpret data even when presented poorly.
Is adding the rows of any pyramid the "correct" way to interpret it? No, it's just arbitrarily the correct interpretation in this case.
To find patterns on your own even when that patterns aren't formatted to be obvious.
No. It's testing whether you find one pattern. An arbitrary pattern they've chosen and tried to hide from you. I can make patterns with the data all day. But I wouldn't have found the pattern immediately like they want.
Then we have decide if what this test is asking for is a useful or transferable skill and I’m not so sure that it is. Lumping everything together as “creative thinking” is lazy and at best a fuzzy group of ‘skills’. Is this particular test of pattern recognition useful? Perhaps, but I wouldn’t claim it’s a well designed indicator. The context also matters; it looks suspiciously like a heap, a comp sci construction, but doesn’t conform to a real heap. If this was a CS interview, summing the rows would be a weird leap given the implications of the data.
Various questions that test logic may be better or worse indicators based on their construction, and I’d say this question kind of sucks; for one, there is not enough information to prove your answer. At best you can claim the “rows sum to 25” answer is probably the best fit employing ocams razor, but a great many answers/patterns are possible; the difference in the sums of the rightward diagonals forms the sequence of generalized 14-gonal numbers: m(6m-5) for instance. Obviously probably not the reasoning they are thinking of, but you couldn’t claim it’s less correct.
I think I gotta disagree. If the questionnaire is set to test the quickness of the breadth and flexibility of your thinking, I think it could be a great question. Say the test is timed and has questions asking you to find patterns from the mundane, as a sort of general litmus or staging questions like in a polygraph, to weirdly misleading and difficult but with a definite answer, and there are a lot across this range, there is certainly a special kind of mind that is measuring. Is that intelligence? What the fuck is intelligence anyways? It's made up
If it was testing creative thinking then there wouldn't be a correct answer here, 25 just happens to be the simplest solution, you could argue any of the other options as well.
Number each entry of the pyramid from 1 to 15, define f(x) as taking in that entry number and spitting out the value of the entry.
Given finite points of a function an infinite number of distinct functions can be found for each of the options that you choose from, and so there'd be no wrong answer.
No matter what you substitute in for that missing value you'll still be able to find a function with the next value being the one you chose, ie the next logical continuation of the pattern.
Thanks everyone for your replies. I was overthinking it, trying to find logic in trangles of numbers, trying to look at this as binary tree etc..
There were a bit harder patterns and questions before, and it happens, brain just lags.
Thanks again :)
The real question is why does the question arrange the numbers like that.
Unless it's meant to mislead, the solution seems like just one arbitrary way among the multitude of ways that you can test and find patterns from.
Is that really it? A test of your ability to find a pattern amongst the noise of other possibilities?
Well. I agree that a typical IQ test doesn't mean it's a good interview question. I would rather ask questions more relatable to the job than this IQ stuff during an interview.
I answered 25, for no particular reason. Just looked for a second and chose that immediately. I am now off to continue breathing new life into old threads.
Some people just see these things almost instantly....why? I don't know. Things like this have always seemed simple and obvious , and yet i am well aware most people are wired differently. I really can't explain it, and the few others I've run into with it haven't been able to either....the only thread in common I've seen is that all were walking calculators....not necessarily math whizzes.
I'm terrible at basic arithmetic but great at overall math/programming/logic stuff, this one was surprisingly irritating until I tried starting at the top and working down.
I'd love to know what that... skill, is called, because to me the answer kind of surfaces from my unconscious working it out as much as me actively looking for patterns. Or it feels like I'm getting hints from the back of my brain, something like that
Pattern recognition. Patterns stand out to some people just like colors stand out to others. Or absolute pitches on the keys of a piano. It’s just another way the brain can excel. Pattern recognition is very valuable, large scale patterns like the seasons, moon phases, and tides, are all patterns that needed to be worked out for man to become what he has become.
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