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The odd one out - inspired by IQ tests
- mildweed 17y agoOr perhaps rephrased as the 'odd one in'...
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- hughprime 17y agoThose sorts of questions always bothered me in IQ tests too. I was also always bothered by questions like: "What comes next in this sequence? 1,4,9,16,25," Sure, the answer might be 36, but then again maybe we're looking at some subtler sequence of numbers than that. Maybe it's "the number of bald men who walked past my house every hour since 5am". Maybe the next number is 345 due to the annual Patrick Stewart Lookalike Parade. Who knows?
- mattmaroon 17y agoYou're probably taking it too seriously then. There's a certain subtext, the catching on to of which might be part of the test, that it's a rational and discernible pattern, and that if the answer is not 36 then the question is broken.
- hughprime 17y agoYou're probably taking it too seriously then. Oh, certainly. I've never found a case where there's genuine ambiguity, it's just that there's a certain part of my brain which takes delight in pointing out all the potential flaws in everything I read. It's much harder to concentrate on the test when half my brain is busy visualizing what four hundred Captain Picards would look like marching down my street.
- chrischen 17y agoYou probably have ADHD, try untimed tests like the Mega or Titan test.
- jamesbritt 17y ago"Oh, certainly. I've never found a case where there's genuine ambiguity ..." I recall a test that asked to pick the one word out of four that was different or didn't fit or something. The thing was, three out of four words described red objects. But a different three out of four words had one syllable; the other had two. So it them became a game of, What was the test creator likely thinking?
- blinks 17y agoThis is why a proper test needs to be administered by a professional, I would expect.
- amix 17y agoI am no fan of IQ tests myself, but I think in most tests they are looking for the most simple and logical answers - and they are trying to create tests that have very little ambiguity. In your sequence it's more logical and simple that the answer is 36, than it is how many bald men walked by your house today. I don't know if IQ tests tell anything about a person's real intelligence, but I think that most intelligent people can become very good at solving these tests.
- hc 17y agothe answer is the simplest possible answer. this isn't obviously well defined, but it can be made so in at least one way: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity
- jerf 17y agoNo dice. Kolmogorov complexity is critically dependent on the encoding scheme you use for the complexity measure, and given the nature of the problems in question that's going to really not work. If your encoding scheme favors polynomials but makes expression squares a royal pain, you're going to get a radically different K-complexity number than you will if your encoding goes the other way around. And coming up with both such encodings is trivial. This is why proofs using K-complexity (forgive me, I often misspell it) always use it in a way that doesn't involve actually assigning numbers to the K-complexity; while it has certain desirable properties, there is no unique K-complexity value for a given language. Aaaaand it's exactly this reason I also loathe those questions. It is much less "do this mathematical thing" than "read the puzzle-maker's mind", and quite frequently there is simply literally not enough information in the sequence to read the puzzle-makers mind. With an uncountably infinite number of functions to choose from and a finite set of inputs to choose among them, it's a complete joke of a test. On the other hand, with suitable constraints given in advance it could prove quite useful. (... but that would remove the thrill of lording the answer over people, methinks, which I think is a distressingly large part of such problem's appeal....)
- hc 17y ago> you're going to get a radically different K-complexity number than you will if your encoding goes the other way around. in the limit, all schemes are roughly equivalent. (they are equivalent up to constants.) > given the nature of the problems in question that's going to really not work ok. so attempting to compute the kolmogorov complexity for iq test problems is a bad idea. it isnt actually a computable function. its existence shows there is a mathematically rigorous way to talk about the most plausible way to extend an integer sequence. more than anything, this is a counter to the argument that "an uncountably infinite number of functions to choose from and a finite set of inputs to choose among them" makes the test entirely subjective. > there is no unique K-complexity value for a given language. for any given language, there is, unless i dont understand what youre saying. > your encoding scheme favors polynomials but makes expression squares a royal pain i know its wrong, but i cant help pointing out that that doesnt actually make any sense at all
- der_ketzer 17y agoThere's a very good movie "The Oxford Murders", where the math professor talks about that. Every sequence has many answers, the trick is to find how to build the sequence you want and when you achieve thar, your answer is as correct as the "right answer".
- maxklein 17y agoThat was a bit easy, I think most people would figure this one out, mostly because there is no decoy, and there is little chance of your trying too long in the wrong direction.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- keefe 17y agoTo me, this says more about the importance of rigorous test writing methodology than the silliness of IQ tests. You're trying to get a particular signal, the fact that noise exists does not eliminate the need to read that signal. However, IQ tests were first developed to determine how far behind normal certain types of children were, rather than as a measure of excellence.
- tel 17y agoI wonder if there's any pattern to the order in which people discover the special properties. I saw it as: green, no frame, small, circle.
- krolley 17y agoI saw it as: no frame, green, small, circle. It just demonstrates that this question might be a good one, if what you're testing for is the order that people find "the odd one" (not necessarily in an IQ test).
- goodside 17y agoThis may not apply to the author of the linked blog post, but it's long been a pet peeve of mine how casually people dismiss intelligence testing after seeing one or two examples of poorly designed questions. The rarely considered reality is that IQ tests vary widely in quality. Some reasons are obvious: The test might be intentionally designed to measure something other than IQ (success in college, performance on a job, money spent on College Board® prep courses). The test might be designed to test within a particular IQ range, whether high or low. The test might be designed only to be taken by people fluent in a particular language, or who received an education from a particular school. And so on. But the biggest and least obvious reason why bad IQ tests are everywhere is that good IQ tests are not only difficult to make, but expensive to make. Good tests are not made by geniuses in armchairs thinking up riddles. Test design is an empirical science, and the final judges of any question's value are the statistical relationships that show up in the answers when the test is given. Empirical evidence sterilizes tests from the biases of their authors, and does so much more effectively than waiting for complaints from morally outraged observers. Questions that penalize takers of different cultural backgrounds are bad questions not because they're socially repugnant, but because they're noisy--you can demonstrate that people who otherwise score highly get the question wrong more often than they should. Questions like those addressed in the blog post, where some really smart people are attracted to a "wrong" answer, will have negative inter-question correlations among the brightest subjects, which is a giant blinking neon sign in any analysis. This sanitizing effect is so strong that the tests which show the most desirable psychometric properties, such as Raven's Progressive Matrices, often evoke the opposite complaint: they're so minimal and homogenous in form that it's hard to accept they're a better measure of IQ than scattershot tests of imperfect analogies and odd-one-out puzzles. If you're curious, RPM goes a little something like this: http://iqtest.dk/main.swf http://iqtest.dk/main.swf IQ testing is a complicated science, and discrediting it because there's one or two (or fifty) dumb questions on the SATs is like giving up on journalism after reading an issue of USA Today.
- hooande 17y agoStandardized tests of any kind are fundamentally flawed. You can't measure a person's intelligence using a test. You can only measure very specific things, and even then you can't expect to do a good job of it. Does a high SAT score predict success in college? People with great test scores drop out / fail out / join the peace corps by the thousands every year. Testing can a good indicator, but it's not an ideal solution. I'm not against testing. There has to be some way to decide who gets into what college, and the SAT is a published standard. But there's no point in defending a flawed system. Let's just accept that IQ tests are a bit ridiculous and move on.
- pyre 17y agoI think that it's funny that a lot of people are saying that the 'odd one' is the 'normal one'. It's just a matter of common features. The large, red, bordered square is the only one that shares more than 2 features with all of the other objects. Features ======== Color Frame Size Shape ----- ----- ---- ----- 1. red yes large square 2. red no large square 3. red yes large circle 4. green yes large square 5. red yes small square Features in Common ================== 1 2 3 4 5 1 - 3 3 3 3 2 3 - 2 2 2 3 3 2 - 2 2 4 3 2 2 - 2 5 3 2 2 2 -
- Gormo 17y agoI don't necessarily see this as a bad question. The correct answer is "it depends on which attribute is most important". If that is an available answer, then the question can effectively separate subjective, presumptuous approaches from objective, analytical ones. If "it depends..." is not an available choice, then it demonstrates that the test itself is subjective and presumptuous, but this doesn't necessarily implicate standardized tests in general.
- kabdib 17y agoI had to read one of the comments below to find out that one of the objects is red instead of green. I'm red-green "colorblind" (about ten precent of males are). Be careful what you are testing.
- barrkel 17y agoI'm red/green colour-blind too, but it relates to contrast. Red doesn't stand out as vibrantly as other colours do, that's all. For example, in dim light, I can find it difficult to tell the difference between brown and red on a snooker table. But close up, or in bright lighting, there's no problem. For example, there's a red, a green and a brown ball in this picture: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e6/Snooker_table.jpg http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e6/Snooker_t... I can tell the difference between the red and the green more easily than the red and the brown. If the red wasn't visible on the table for comparison, and the brown wasn't near its home spot on the centre of the baulk line, I wouldn't be sure it's not red. I doubt that 10% of males have the same level of difficulty distinguishing red from green as you indicate.
- xiaoma 17y agoThe one on the left is the odd one out because it doesn't have a single unique feature.
- peterhuesken 17y agoThe first one is special, for two reasons: 1) as stated by others earlier: it´s the only one that isn´t special The next reason states it more clearly imo. 2) the first symbol differs from the other four symbols in exactly 1 way; the other symbols differ from each other in 2 ways.