Sieve
Find the rule. Don’t fool yourself.
Three secret rules a day. Test anything you like, then pass the exam. Most people fool themselves.
How to play
- Every day there are three secret rules: Easy, Medium and Hard. Each is satisfied by some English words or whole numbers. You see three examples that pass.
- Test anything you like. Each probe tells you instantly whether it passes or fails. You have 8 probes, 10 on Hard.
- When you think you have it, take the exam: label six new items pass or fail.
- The rule is revealed, along with the rule you were probably thinking of instead. Your Skeptic score tracks how often you tried to break your own hypothesis rather than confirm it.
The experiment behind it
In 1960 Peter Wason gave people the number triple 2-4-6 and asked them to discover the rule that produced it, testing triples of their own. Most people formed a hypothesis such as “counting up by two” and then only proposed triples that fit it, so they never learned the rule was simply “any increasing sequence”. Sieve turns that experiment into a daily game: three secret rules, a handful of probes, and a score that rewards trying to break your own idea.