Seriously, though, it seems a bit of leap from the existence of confirmation bias to explaining away the public outpourings of US Politicians about their financial crises and foreign policy disasters - in the absence of better data as to just why the given statements were made ascribing this to confirmation bias seems itself open to accusations of confirmation bias! :)

This doesn't mean I always use these—at the very least, I have to explicitly jump into "problem solving" mode—but it means they can be useful.

It's still a meaningful difference, and could very well apply to lots of things beyond this kind of puzzle.

I was relieved, in fact, when it worked with negatives and floats in a "safe" range.

I also tested with 1,1,2 and 1,2,2 to make sure that the required increase applied to ALL of the values, not just a specific pair.

The observation to brainstorm for ways of proving that a statement is in fact wrong, and exhausting them, is such an eloquent way of wording the hunt for a negative.

Like others here have said it wasn't a particularly hard "rule" to figure out. Easy to immediately rule out geometric relationship as in 2^y, which didn't leave a whole lot of possibilities to test. For the commenters here, I'd attribute ease of finding the solution to familiarity with the kinds of problems that programming presents.

Which leads to the idea there's value in learning even the rudiments of programming. Logically, it should encourage better problem-solving skills in general. We might think there this has important implications for our educational systems. But I know, that's probably not realistic at all.

    [3 5 7]
    [7 5 3]
    [8 4 2]
    [5 7 3]
    [1 2 3]
    [1 1 1]
    [0 1 2]

Most importantly I used about 6 tests (3 right 3 wrong) to come up with the answer and then did another 17 looking for the trick. After all, it couldn't just be that simple right?

So after the tests listed above I felt confident enough to guess.

At that point, I correctly answered the question.

But it accepts zero percent of real numbers.

To talk about a certain fraction of real numbers you have to have a distribution over them. In general we take the uniform distribution if no distribution is explicitly given. That doesn't work for real numbers (it doesn't even work for natural numbers). (See https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/14777/why-isnt-ther...)

If there's no implicit default distribution, we have to pick on. I can pick one where they cover an arbitrary high percentage of real numbers..

We can't reasonably talk about a percent coverage, since the Lebesgue measure of the reals is infinite, but as a non-technical description, 'zero percent' is morally equivalent to saying it only covers a measure-zero set.

4,6,8 Y 1,1,1 N 1,2,3 Y 1,6666,8777 Y 1,0,1 N 3,2,1 N 3,2,3 N 5,6,4 N 7,5,6 N

But I totally see why it would cause you to pause and rethink your original idea :).

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" is pretty small, but your ability to fool people with the first sample run is almost unbounded, so that helps.

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 you to guess three numbers to get the job).

Right? What answer did you give?

Yes, double the previous number

Yes, Each number much larger than the previous

Yes, sequence must always increase by 1

Yes, Powers of 2

Yes, h = 2n, i = 2(n+1), j = 2(n+2) . n is an integer

Yes, Powers of 2

As a result we can't really rely on overall accuracy, but we can break it out by yes/no to account for the selection bias to get a profile for how a HN correct and incorrect differ.

How many "I know the answer, but can I find a flaw in their code" questions did you ask?

Personally, I spent most of my answers playing with the inputs. The form was happy to report that "1e1, 15, 0x10" was a valid sequence. :D

FWIW, I've seen this kind of game before and I was expecting it to be something simple.

When I clicked "I think I know it", nothing happened. I don't want to click their "I don't want to play; just tell me the answer". But it seems like the right answer. I can't answer your form question if it is the right anwer, since I haven't clicked on their link and don't know for a fact whether it is or not.

Although I used the wrong term, it's strictly increasing.

If anyone's tallying

> 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.

In what sense? How did they know that e.g. (1, 1, 1) didn't work, unless they tried it?

I don't specifically recall seeing one, but it is likely that I have.

  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<y<z, and not something like x<=y<=z)

8 4 2 (no) 1 2 3 (yes) 1 1 1 (no) 1 100 123 (yes) 1.0 1.1 1.2 (yes)

answer: incrementing numbers

Could you perhaps move to a bar chart instead of pie charts?