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Am I the only one that gets driven kind of crazy by these kinds of problems? I'm not completely sure so far what it is, but I'm guessing it's the frustration o

• narag 5y ago
  I don't know, the first took me two seconds, the second five and the third five too. I stopped reading there because the article says next ones are harder and I would like to take a quiet time to read the whole thing. I use to solve chess problems at lichess, a similar concept. Maybe. Is it really an infinite haystack? It's context. And simplest solutions first, gradually think of more complicated ones. First try to find a pattern visually, then use simple concepts, then more complex concepts.
• solveit 5y ago
  You're certainly not the only one, but the point of the article is that solving these kinds of problems, with all the vagueness that implies, is an important feature of human intelligence.
  • mckirk 5y ago
    Since I generally seem to do fairly well in problem solving, that is exactly what I'm trying to figure out: Are these problems actually representative of an important skill that you need for general problem solving, or are they, through their nature of being man-made puzzles, actually in a realm of their own? When I'm looking at some pattern that I'm trying to find a rule for in real-life, I don't think I'm running into the same frustration and in fact greatly enjoy trying to figure out rules for how things work (or so I believe, at least). I think a crucial difference is that I know that the problems I encounter in real-life are only "as complex as necessary", and the data I'm looking at is a direct result of some process that serves a specific goal; presumably one I think "makes sense", as I wouldn't look for a rule otherwise. In contrast, puzzles are made to be complicated on purpose, and I suspect that annoys me subconsciously to the point where my brain complains about engaging with it. But it's only these kinds of "figure out the rules" puzzles, so there has to be another important difference compared to logic puzzles. Possibly the difference is: for the logic puzzle, the "meta-rules" for the problem are made explicit and I know the solution-space exactly. For the Bongard problems here I found myself thinking for example: "wait, is it always just two groups distinguished by single rule, or can there be dependencies on the positions of the symbols within the groups as well? What kind of solution am I even looking for?", and that also apparently frustrates me. Sorry for the wall of text, but I've actually been trying to figure out why these kinds of problems get on my nerves for quite a long time, lol.
    • formerly_proven 5y ago
      Bongard puzzles are pretty much the same as the test matrices in IQ tests, which annoy me in the exact same way these Bongard puzzles do. If you'd ask people questions in the same manner these puzzles do, they would refuse to answer because they'd feel trolled. Arguably, that's the case.
      • antlerboy 5y ago
        They're closely related to Raven's Progressive Matrices https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raven%27s_Progressive_Matrices https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raven%27s_Progressive_Matrices which are indeed the source for IQ tests. But the point of this all is that rationality works within a frame; Bongard games are just an illustration that the real problem of meaning and choice and acting in the world is the not-rational one of choosing a framing.
• alpaca128 5y ago
  The cumbersome part is that the first step requires you to pick up patterns and differences without knowing which are actually relevant. Which is fine for the first few puzzles, but gets much harder with increasing amounts of details. It's basically the same kind of problem that one faces in the more frustrating debugging sessions where you're looking at tons of data and try to find a pattern or clue of what causes the bug under what circumstances.
  • layer8 5y ago
    At least with Bongard problems you don’t have heisenbugs.
• rrmm 5y ago
  Don't worry you can always solve these problems trivially: The examples on the left side are all on the left side, while the examples on the right side are not.
  • rrmm 5y ago
    The fact that the solution of these problems is in some sense satisfying also has a lot to do with the fact that the people making these problems are Western systematic-thinkers. They think like us (because we were trained by them). That's not to say there isn't value in learning this way of thinking, it's gotten society a long way.
    • jxf 5y ago
      How would you characterize the opposite of (or alternative to) "systematic" thinking?
      • rrmm 5y ago
        Not an alternative to systematization, but different systems. Just that the analogies or groups that make sense to one group may not make sense to others.
        • ghodith 5y ago
          Could you give an example of a different type?
          • rrmm 5y ago
            Broadly, for example, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2838233/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2838233/ """ Analytic cognition is characterized by taxonomic and rule-based categorization of objects, a narrow focus in visual attention, dispositional bias in causal attribution, and the use of formal logic in reasoning. In contrast, holistic cognition is characterized by thematic and family-resemblance-based categorization of objects, a focus on contextual information and relationships in visual attention, an emphasis on situational causes in attribution, and dialecticism (Nisbett, Peng, Choi, & Norenzayan, 2001). """ This also comes up a lot in cognitive test design. The anecdote I've always heard in reference to it was """ What is considered wise in one society may not be considered wise in another; the value and meaning of intelligence depends on cultural norms. Demonstrating the culturally-specific nature of knowledge and intelligence, Cole, Gay, Glick, and Sharp (1971) conducted an experiment in which Western participants and Kpelle participants from Liberia were given an object-sorting task. Participants were asked to sort twenty objects that were divided evenly into the linguistic cat-egories of foods, implements, food containers, and clothing. Westerners tended to sort these objects into the groups for food and implements, while Liberian partici-pants would routinely pair a potato with a knife because, they reasoned, the knife is used to cut the potato. When questioned, Liberian participants justified their pairings by stating that a wise person would group the items in this way. When the researchers asked them to show what an unwise person would do, they did the taxonomic sort that is more familiar to the Western culture. """ quoted from https://uscaseps.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/standardized-testing.pdf https://uscaseps.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/standardized...
• glaukopis 5y ago
  I feel similarly; the author mentions spending ten minutes trying to solve one of these puzzles, and I can’t imagine doing that and enjoying it. Maybe it’s the case that spending more time on the ones that stumped me would yield fruit, but I have the impression that on this class of problem, if I don’t see the solution within two minutes then I probably won’t be able to figure it out in ten, which disincentivizes investing time in them. I’d be interested in knowing if the people who /can/ solve all the problems in the article do so by investing time in them and being methodical or if they just “see it” eventually, which is how I feel solving the easier ones. There’s also the factor that some Bongard problems, independent of their difficulty factor, are just more satisfying than others. Spoiler for the fourth one, with pairs of circles: its solution is that the entries on the left have $property while the ones on the right...don’t. This makes the right side virtually useless except to check the rule that you derived from the left side. Maybe it’s just that I don’t have research experience, and am thus unsteeled against problems that seem impenetrable, or maybe I just don’t have the mindset to be good at these, but I agree the really difficult ones can be frustrating.
• skybrian 5y ago
  I think this has to do with tolerance for being stuck, and that varies depending on how rewarded you think you’ll be for figuring it out and getting unstuck. Real science and math involves getting stuck on problems, perhaps for weeks, months, or years. I guess we should be happy that there are people who can tolerate being stuck. My tolerance for getting stuck on a mere game has dropped dramatically since I was a kid; many of the games we played then are unplayable by modern standards. You had to draw maps and take notes, yourself, rather than the computer remembering things for you. But text adventures back then sometimes weren’t meant to be played alone. The game might be single-player but it was a group activity for college students where you’d share ideas. The modern equivalent might be games where you’re expected to search the web to find recipes and strategies for things.
  • mckirk 5y ago
    Yep, we aren't exactly being conditioned towards higher frustration tolerance nowadays... I don't think I could still deal with a PC without an SSD. I think there are different kinds of being-stuck, though. With many problems in science, there's at least things you can try to gather more data. So you're stuck, but you can come up with new experiments to get new insights into the problem. Here, you're only given the one set of examples and have to make do. I guess you could still see the process of generating hypothesis and testing them against the examples as a sort of "experiment", but it still feels a lot "stuckier" if you don't get anywhere with it.
• aaron-santos 5y ago
  I can see where you're coming from. I always have to judge my working solutions using the parsimony of features and parsimony of rules to navigate the feature/solution landscape of Bongard problems. The underlying assumption is that the problem's author has followed the same rules which is an assumption of good faith on my part. This narrows down the feature-solution space considerably or at least biases it in a way where I can prioritize hypotheses in a more tractable way. Part of what I feel makes me a good puzzle solver is imagining that I'm a puzzle maker. What was going through the author's mind when they conceived the puzzle? If I can start to pull at that thread then the complexity of the puzzle will start to unravel.
  • b3morales 5y ago
    I was thinking along these lines too when the author went into machines solving the problems. One bit that jumped out was the quote from Hofstadter: > They depend on a sense of simplicity which is not just limited to earthbound human beings. Followed immediately by a problem whose solution depends on having a sense of 3-D objects in gravity! Solving Bongard problems is surely a hard thing to get an AI to do, but I am wondering too about AI-authored instances. Or, say, problems authored by aliens, with a different evolutionary history, and different in-built biases for cognition. Would they necessarily be solvable by humans, or our Bongard problems solvable by them? Some aspects (number maybe?) are probably universal. But even a good-faith puzzle maker has to take some assumption of shared basis for perception. This probably connects up to the author's final point that "what objects even are" is not absolute.
    • aaron-santos 5y ago
      > Followed immediately by a problem whose solution depends on having a sense of 3-D objects in gravity! I can think of a Bongard problem where the images on the left are rebuses which spell English words, and images on the right are rebuses which spell Russian words. That's baking a LOT of a priori knowledge into the the puzzle. Alexandre Linhares' A glimpse at the metaphysics of Bongard problems talks a bit about what assumptions can go into this problems: > An interesting but generally ignored aspect of Bongard problems is that their difficulty for a given subject is directly associated his or hers (or the system’s) previous experience.Since the problems consist of geometric figures, one may be led to believe that cultural factors do not influence the performance of a person attempting to solve them. This is not the case. > Solving Bongard problems is surely a hard thing to get an AI to do, but I am wondering too about AI-authored instances. I like where you're going. I left out the search I did of "generative adversarial networks bongard" because no good results popped up. (Hint: this would make for a fantastic HN post if any researcher wants to earn fake internet points). Finally, this[2] comment stuck with me over the years. As always, would solving or generating Bongard problems be a quantum leap in AI or would they, like so many other problems, be subsumed into the category of AI-solvable problems and we all move on to the next problem at the frontier? [1] - http://app.ebape.fgv.br/comum/arq/Linhares2.pdf http://app.ebape.fgv.br/comum/arq/Linhares2.pdf [2] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8964017 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8964017