Pattern Recognition Brain Teaser

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Here’s a puz­zle to test your abil­i­ty to find a pat­tern and test it against more data.

In this table, each row across fol­lows the same pat­tern of num­bers. See if you can dis­cern the pat­tern and fill in the miss­ing num­ber in the bot­tom row. For added chal­lenge (or com­pe­ti­tion), time how long it takes you to com­plete the puz­zle. Then, pass it along to some­one else and see if they can solve it faster. The slow­er one has to cook dinner!

7 4 8
3 9 7
6 5 10
? 8 4

Exec­u­tive func­tions, like plan­ning, and spa­tial pro­cess­ing are han­dled by your frontal lobes.

Have you solved it yet? If not, here’s a hint:

If you read your fig­ures like words in the West,
then mul­ti­ply your efforts and sub­tract the rest.

Keep read­ing for the answer and solu­tion.

(7x4)-8 = 20

(3x9)-7 = 20

(3x8)-4 = 20

The answer is 3.

 

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Comments

  2. Michael Vogt says

    Blast! Why was the solu­tion at the bot­tom of the page? I glanced at it before I had a chance to attempt the puz­zle. Why not make it so you have to click to find the solu­tion so you don’t acci­den­tal­ly see it?

  3. Lmnop says

    Yay, I got 3 also. I’m not usu­al­ly amaz­ing with math, so I’m very sur­prised that I got it. But I solved it the exact same way as ican­rule. Great minds think alike, I suppose 😉

  4. Lmnop says

    Oh, and, as a ran­dom addi­tion, I found anoth­er pat­tern. In the 1st and 3rd lines, the mid­dle num­ber is the low­est num­ber, while the out­side two are high­er, and lines 2 and 4 are the oppo­site. That’s the first pat­tern I was try­ing to follow.

  5. johnboy says

    i have streets but no pave­ments i have cities but no build­ings i have for­rests but no trees i have rivers yet no water what am i

  8. Anand says

    7 comes next; you are list­ing prime num­bers and per­fect squares in numer­i­cal order.

  9. . says

    This visu­al-spa­tial rea­son­ing ques­tion is sim­i­lar to those that appear in the UMAT.

  11. Philippe says

    I found anoth­er (awkward)pattern. If you add the two out­side num­bers from each row, sub­tract 1 from the sum and last­ly pick the end­ing dig­it of the num­ber, that would be your numer­i­cal val­ue in the mid­dle. If you lim­it the numer­i­cal vari­ables to sin­gle dig­it num­bers then the num­ber to the left in the last row would have been five. E.g.-

    7+8=15–1=14 (four)
    3+7=10–1=9 (nine)
    6+10=16–1=15 (five) and last­ly you would have
    x+4–1=8, your answer would be 5,