From widely shared optical illusions and brain teasers to the strange, blue-and-black phenomenon that was The Dress, it’s clear that the internet is infatuated with puzzles.
The latest which seems to have captured collective attention is about choosing which box contains a car. Posted on Monday by the Daily Mail, the puzzle was found on Brilliant.org, a problem-solving site.
The premise: there are three boxes and one has a car in it. Each box has a statement attached to it, but only one of the statements is true. The statement on Box 1 reads “The car is in this box”. On Box 2: “The car is not in this box.” Box 3: “The car is not in box 1.” So which box contains the car?
It’s similar to other puzzles, such as one called Evil King Berman and the Three Boxes. That one features a picture of “Fair Maiden Rowena” in one of three boxes made of gold, silver and lead (making it vaguely reminiscent of the three caskets test in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice).
The fascination with the car puzzle follows a slew of recent viral visual illusions.
A photo of a girl’s legs left Twitter users scratching their heads, wondering if the legs were very shiny or splattered with white paint. It earned over 16,000 retweets and plenty of news coverage.
Once you see it you can't unsee it pic.twitter.com/5mREeJUhYV
— bree (@msbreeezyyy) October 25, 2016
A similar debate ensued over a 2013 photo of a man imitating a crying baby. When the photo resurfaced last week thanks to Reddit, many debated whether the man pictured was Bill Murray or Tom Hanks.
A particularly challenging game of I-Spy took over the internet in July, after a woman uploaded a photo of a floral carpet and coffee table to Facebook. “Look for the cellphone,” the caption read. The phone’s case is a close match to the pattern of the carpet, making it difficult to find. (Need a hint? Look near the table’s legs).
A photo of gray lines on a white background with black dots that seem to move with the viewer’s eyes gained attention in September. Posted to Facebook by Akiyoshi Kitaoka, a psychology professor at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto, Japan, the image actually contains 12 black dots, even if you can’t see them all at once. Only the black dots within a person’s field of vision appear.
The headache-inducing image is an example of the “extinction effect” and was created by the researchers Jacques Ninio and Kent A Stevens, according to Quartz. It was a variation on the Hermann grid and scintillating grid illusions.
The Hermann grid is a famous illusion with a black background and a grid of white lines. When you stare at one intersection, the others all seem to be filled with grey. The scintillating grid is a variation of this, with a grey grid and black background. A white disk is placed at each intersection, making black dots seem to appear and disappear.
The grid created by Ninio and Stevens places outlined circles at the intersections of a more complicated grid, which makes the circles outside the field of vision seem to disappear.
