The relationship between this approach and the XOR approach is interesting, I think. Thinking in XOR terms requires fancier mental infrastructure—you need to have seen something like the idea of XOR before, and to be able to notice slightly subtle relationships between different parts of the figure. On the other hand, spotting that particular features tend to occur in rectangles involves spotting simpler things but paying more global attention to the whole figure.
It feels like these play to different aspects of cognitive ability; spotting complicated patterns versus spotting large ones, so to speak. I guess the latter is closely related to working memory size, which I know is generally thought to be a large contributor to measured IQ. The former seems like an important aspect of intelligence too, and strikes me as more likely to be trainable than working memory size.
I got the answer fairly quick (didn’t time it, but probably about a minute or two). In my head, I was thinking of subtraction, not even “cancelling out”.
In a row, cell 1 minus cell 2 equaled cell 3.
I suppose that is an XOR pattern after all, but you only need knowledge of basic arithmetic to verbalize the pattern.
(edit: upon rereading my answer, I guess it’s not fair to call it a subtraction only, since I’m still keeping around shapes from cell 1 or cell 2 provided they weren’t subtracted. Apparently my brain is doing XOR while thinking of it as a subtraction)
Yup, that’s about the level of fanciness. Not too bad, as you say, but I think harder to think of than four things forming a rectangle. (But maybe easier to notice, as I suggested above.)
The relationship between this approach and the XOR approach is interesting, I think. Thinking in XOR terms requires fancier mental infrastructure—you need to have seen something like the idea of XOR before, and to be able to notice slightly subtle relationships between different parts of the figure. On the other hand, spotting that particular features tend to occur in rectangles involves spotting simpler things but paying more global attention to the whole figure.
It feels like these play to different aspects of cognitive ability; spotting complicated patterns versus spotting large ones, so to speak. I guess the latter is closely related to working memory size, which I know is generally thought to be a large contributor to measured IQ. The former seems like an important aspect of intelligence too, and strikes me as more likely to be trainable than working memory size.
(I did it with XOR.)
I had the same reaction to calling it “fancy”.
I got the answer fairly quick (didn’t time it, but probably about a minute or two). In my head, I was thinking of subtraction, not even “cancelling out”.
In a row, cell 1 minus cell 2 equaled cell 3.
I suppose that is an XOR pattern after all, but you only need knowledge of basic arithmetic to verbalize the pattern.
(edit: upon rereading my answer, I guess it’s not fair to call it a subtraction only, since I’m still keeping around shapes from cell 1 or cell 2 provided they weren’t subtracted. Apparently my brain is doing XOR while thinking of it as a subtraction)
Yup, that’s about the level of fanciness. Not too bad, as you say, but I think harder to think of than four things forming a rectangle. (But maybe easier to notice, as I suggested above.)