[aaron-santos]

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.

[mckirk]

Hmmmm yes, this assumption of good faith might actually be an important part of approaching these problems. I think I instinctively look for approaches to problems that would work even for adversarial examples. In the case of these puzzles, that of course doesn't work, because you then imagine the rule to be something completely outlandish and give up before you've even checked the easy options.

Something like "I know it's _possible_ the author has chosen a ridiculous rule, so it doesn't make sense for me to look for it, because even if I find it, I just got lucky and didn't actually solve the problem."

That might be a side-effect of perfectionism, actually.

[b3morales]

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]

> 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 [2] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8964017

[SyzygistSix]

This makes a lot of sense. People have wondered how our cognition would be affected by living in zero gravity.

And our language reflects these cognitive biases; how we would express the experience of "getting high" in zero gravity?