Thankfully as it gives me something to write, I got home this evening and some family friends had come to visit and they recommended The 1% Club to people in the room, which I concurred with, and so I put it on over dinner after they’d left and fun was had by all.
But my brother (younger than me, a fair bit more creative) came up with an answer to a question and I’m trying to work out why the logic is wrong. Forgive the crap screenshot:
Now the correct answer is 4 – when watching it live on Saturday night I spotted that immediately thanks to pattern recognition – it’s the amount of times the lines cross (intersections if you like).
My brother looks at it and goes “8”. What an idiot! But his logic was quite interesting – if you take the first shape and take away the second shape that lies within it you get the third shape – 9-1=8. And I wracked my brains and couldn’t really find a fault. What’s the leap in logic I’m missing that makes it definitively incorrect?
It may be a bit of a stretch, but is it that what is in the second shape, is not definitely what’s missing from the first one, following that logic (as the vertical line is too far left)
The topologist in me screams against it, but I can see the argument.
Mmm-m-m-m. In many ways I think your brother’s is a smarter answer than the one declared correct, and that’s certainly a technique used in other IQ test questions, so well done your brother. (Their answer becomes clearer if the arms of the middle one aren’t the same length as in the left one, or are at a slightly different angle.) When there’s an independent adjudicator the buck stops with them, so no matter how much fun it was to work on, you’re making yourself an awfully big target to shoot at.
The risk with the questions is that there’s a feeling of “Can you guess what were we thinking of when we set the question?” for some of them, which makes them feel more like riddles than puzzles. Odd-one-out questions are notoriously bad for this, though I think the ones in this show were cute enough to largely get away with it. The 1% question definitely smelled a little of “what were we thinking?”. Yes, they had an explanation, but it felt a little more arbitrary than I’d like in my puzzling, without some indicators like “most thematic”. That said, I didn’t have an alternative answer to that in the thirty seconds in question.
Incidentally, I don’t see anyone having congratulated the show’s winner. If you are the show’s winner and you see this: well done and good for you!
It all comes down to how you view the puzzle. There’s no explicit demand to subtract one value from the other – and using a complex puzzle to basically ask “what’s nine minus one” with both numbers displayed brazenly would perhaps seem like a double-bluff too far – but that it’s more of a substitution cipher kind of thing – “if (A) equals 9 and (B) equals 1 then what does (C) mean?” Replace the images with the words (say, HAWKMOTHS, H and HAWK) and you’ll see the same logic at work. In any case, if you did do a subtraction – as in, you removed the central ‘+’ from the ‘frame’ device to leave just the outline – then you’d be taking away not just the middle crosspoint shown but also the middle bars’ intersection with the top/bottom/sides, essentially subtracting 5 from the first image, bringing you back to 4 and making the ‘1’ on screen your own red herring…
There are greater minds than me involved with this place, but it strikes me that the biggest issue here is that if you look at the graphic as drawn, they seem to have attempted to negate the subtraction solution. The shape for ‘1’ cannot be directly superimposed on the one for ‘9’ because the vertical beam is off centre.
It would still be better to have something clearer as an example, but I’m now starting to see why tapings on this were drawn out if this sort of thing happened often, to the point that disputes were raised.
The trouble with logic is logic can justify more than one answer. The opening question tonight used rhyming as their justification but as the three stated and the wrong answer were all children TV characters whilst to my knowledge Incey Wincey was not, there is logic in that too.
Watching tonight and feeling two common issues raised last week could actually solve each other by switching back to the question in full screen for part of the 30 seconds, helping both the legibility issue and justifyi g the 30 seconds.