Tasty teasers
Bongard bafflers
Mikhail Bongard was a Soviet computer scientist who studied how computers recognise patterns. In the mid-1960s he devised a style of problem in which 12 images are placed together, as below. The six images on the left conform to a pattern, or rule. The six images on the right conform to a different pattern, often the negative of the rule that applies to the images on the left.
The challenge is to discover the rule that the left obeys and the rule that the right obeys.
Here’s an easy one to get you started:
The answer is that, on the left, all the shapes are triangles, and, on the right, they are all quadrilaterals.
The rules in the following problems are all very simple, but finding them can be fiendish.
