Back to the buzzer room Question 1 of 20
Twenty grids

Eight squares are
filled in. Work out
the ninth.

Something changes as you read each row left to right. Work out what it is, then pick the piece that belongs in the empty corner.

1 rule running in this one

Which one finishes it?

One rule at a time to start with, three at once by the end. Nothing is timed against you, there is no going back a question, and you will not be told whether you were right until all twenty are done — then every one of them comes back with its rule spelled out.

How these are built

  1. The questions are generated, not stored. Reload this page and you get twenty different grids. There is no bank of items to memorise and no way to have seen these exact ones before, which also means nobody can hand you an answer key.
  2. The rule always runs across the row. Either the same thing steps through three values in every row, or each row shifts it along by one so that every value shows up once per row and once per column. Both are readable from left to right. Nothing depends on adding shapes together or counting sides.
  3. Five things can change: how many shapes there are, whether they are empty, half-toned or solid, which way they point, which shape they are, and how big they are drawn. Anything a rule is not controlling is held identical in all nine squares, so there is exactly one defensible answer.
  4. The five wrong options each change one thing about the right answer — not always the thing the rule was about, because if the distractors only varied along the rule you could throw three of them out without reading the grid at all.
  5. No two options ever look the same. They are compared as pictures rather than as descriptions, which matters more than it sounds: a diamond turned 90° is the same drawing as a diamond turned 0°, and a square is a diamond turned 45°. Comparing the underlying numbers instead would quietly put the same shape in the list twice.
  6. Nothing is timed and nothing tells you if you were right until the end. Knowing the answer to question six changes how you read question seven, and a visible clock turns this into a speed test. Your time per question is recorded and reported, but it never touches the score.
  7. This is not an IQ score and cannot be converted into one. A real one is a rank against a large sample of people your age, measured under controlled conditions across several different kinds of task. This is twenty grids on your phone, and what it actually tells you is which of the five rules you find easy to see and which one you keep walking past.

Elsewhere in the buzzer room