The-So-You-Think-You're-Creative-Quiz

Breaking out

The classic puzzle on this page is one you may remember solving as a kid; it's the prototype of all puzzles requiring raw creativity--that is, the ability to discover new solutions by freeing yourself of imaginary boundaries and restrictions. In case you've forgotten, the test is:

Draw four straight lines through these nine dots without retracing and without lifting your pen from the paper.

The following puzzles demand the same kind of "breakout" thinking and were compiled by Princeton Creative Research, Inc. Give them a try, then turn to page 214 for the answers.

The compulsive smoker

We are frequently too hasty and impatient in solving problems and, as a result, we overlook the obvious. This problem illustrates how easy it is to overlook a simple element that sometimes is the key to the correct solution.

A heavy smoker wakes up in the middle of the night and finds himself out of cigarettes. He gets dressed and rushes out, but the streets are deserted and all the stores, restaurants and bars are closed. Arriving back in his apartment, he looks through all the wastepaper baskets and ashtrays for butts, figuring out that with five butts he (continued on page 210) Creative quiz (continued from page 177) can make a new cigarette. He finds 25 butts, enough to last him until the stores open, if he smokes one cigarette every hour. How long does his supply last?

In And Out Letters

Creative solutions to problems are often simple, elegant, even obvious. Yet it is the obvious that frequently escapes our notice, because we have been conditioned to look for the complicated when solving problems.

A man draws a circle, then begins to place all the letters of the alphabet either inside or outside the circle. A goes inside, B belongs outside, C belongs outside, D belongs outside, E goes in the circle, F goes in the circle. Where do G, H and the rest of the alphabet belong? What is the system being used?

Loose Ends

This problem illustrates how defining a problem too narrowly can inhibit and delay finding a solution.

Look at the sketch below and imagine that you are the person shown standing in the room. You have been given the task of holding the ends of the two strings suspended from the ceiling. The strings are located so that you cannot reach one string with your outstretched arm while holding the second. The room is bare and you have only the resources you would normally have in your pocket or handbag. How do you solve this problem?

The Collected Works

We are frequently hampered in creative problem solving by our habitual ways of looking at things. The more familiar a situation or an object is, the harder it is to see it differently. Creativity, however, requires a "fresh pair of eyes."

While this problem looks deceptively simple, it is actually quite difficult. As a matter of fact, only about one person in 100 is able to solve it the first time around. The problem is included because it is extremely instructive.

There are four volumes of Shakespeare's collected works on the shelf. The pages of each volume are exactly two inches thick. The covers are each one sixth of an inch thick. The bookworm started eating at page one of volume one and it ate through to the last page of volume four. What is the distance the bookworm traveled?

The Greek Cross

This problem trains your ability to avoid restrictions that hamper your mind and that don't exist in the given problem statement.

Ten coins are arranged as below.

Move just two coins to another position so that a Greek cross, containing six coins in each of the two rows, will be formed. (This problem is best solved with actual coins on a table.)

A Woman's Ingenuity

With some problems, a creative solution can occur only after the elements or parts of the problem have been reorganized into a different pattern. This requires that, in your mind's eye, you do some juggling of the parts visually.

A businessman brought back from Europe four pieces of chain in solid gold, each consisting of three links:

He wanted to keep these as an investment, but his wife felt that, joined together, these pieces would make a lovely necklace. So she went to a jeweler and said, "I want you to connect these pieces to make a necklace. How much will it cost?" The jeweler laid the individual pieces of chain out in this pattern:

He told the lady, "I charge two-fifty to break a link and two-fifty to melt it together again. Since you have four corners, it will cost you twenty dollars."

The lady said, "That's too much. Actually, you can do it for fifteen dollars."

The problem, then, is to construct a necklace, breaking and joining only three links. How would you do it?

Matching Triangles

Using six kitchen matches, make four equilateral triangles out of the six matches.

Draw Your Watch

Creativity requires exact, recallable observation. It requires that we make discriminating and refined use of our senses.

On a piece of paper, draw the face of your watch without looking at it.

Now look at the result. Chances are that you missed a few important details or drew them wrong--almost everybody does.

Draw Your Steering Wheel

If you think you screwed up your watch face badly or if you don't wear one, try drawing the steering wheel of your car--probably the only object in front of which you spend more time than your television. Cheaters who go out into the garage to peek get extra points for effort.

It's In The Bag

This exercise shows that with some problems requiring a creative solution, you need to reverse the problem, or stand it on its head, so to speak. How would you solve the following problem?

It was the 16th hole. The newcomer had an excellent chance of winning. His iron shot had fallen short of the green and he had a good chance of making a birdie. Smiling broadly, he bounded down the fairway, then stopped short in utter dismay. His ball had rolled into a small paper bag carelessly tossed there by someone in the gallery. If he removed the ball from the bag, it would cost him a penalty stroke. If he tried to hit the ball while it was in the bag, he would lose control of the shot. For a moment, he stood there pondering the problem. Then he solved it. How?

Kindred Relations

Think of a fifth word that is related to the preceding four words. (You can form compound, hyphenated words, in some cases, or commonly used expressions.)

Examples:

1. Elephant, bleed, lie, wash_____

Answer: White (white elephant, bleed white, white lie, whitewash)

2. Sleeping, contest, spot, shop_____

Answer: Beauty (sleeping beauty, beauty contest, beauty spot, beauty shop)

3. Style, love, jacket, span_____

Answer: Life (lifestyle, love life, life jacket, life span)

Now train your own associative powers with the following sets:

Bridge The Gaps

Most of us hamper our creative thinking by letting our vocabularies become rigid. This exercise will enable you to attain greater freedom and fluency in your vocabulary. It will also loosen up your mind to form quick associations. And associations are the stuff from which new concepts and original ideas are made.

Playing it with others makes it an interesting game to stimulate imagination.

Fill in each of the three spaces between the two key words with words that have a meaningful relation with the one preceding and the one following it. Examples:

Possible answers: Dark color white snow shovel

Possible answers: School guard house dog run

Now it's your turn:

Word Chains

Most creative people are noted for the voluminous vocabulary they have at their command. The more words you can think of, the more readily you can form associations. Words represent ideas, and most new, creative ideas are the result of a thinking process called association of ideas.

Here is a series of four-letter words that have nothing in common. By changing only one letter at a time, think of a series of words to build a bridge between the two.

Example: Work/lame

1. Work, pork, pore, tore, tome, tame, lame

2. Work, cork, core, come, came, lame

The fewer words you use to build the bridge, the better.

Now experiment with these:

1. Fire/mint

2. Love/part

3. Rise/bath

4. Came/dirt

5. Hate/love

6. Find/lose

7. Nest/mean

8. Swim/clip

9. Give/take

10. Tour/sort

11. Male/word

12. Miss/base

13. Cake/bill

14. Mean/soap

15. Pave/tort

16. Wild/more

17. Book/list

What's The Drift?

Effective problem solvers are noted for their keen observational powers. Alertness of observation frequently provides the necessary clues that lead to effective solutions to problems.

This exercise is designed to train and strengthen your observational ability.

In the following series, the words are related not by meaning but by spelling. Find the relationship and the rule used in creating each series.

Example:

Uniform dungeon stunning immunity tribunal thereunder excommunicate superabundance

Answer: The letters UN move with each word one letter to the right.

Now try these series:

1. Friendliest siesta disinterested supercelestial incontestable festering prestigious suggestiveness pestilential destructively establishment

2. Artful spectacular tartly sweetheart starve surcharge retarded smartly forearm smarting

3. Bath think pithy ethereal leather methadone stealthily deathless playthings

4. Antagonism commandant cantaloupe dilettante plantation supplanted synanthous implanting phantasm romantic banter shanty ante cant

5. Rotunda oration pronounce northern chromatic florescence metropolis uncorrected primrose sartorial rapturous immemorial metachromatic metaphor

(Answers begin on next page.)

Answers:

Breaking Out

This puzzle is a perfect illustration of how rules and restrictions that we carry with us unconsciously can inhibit problem solving and why most people cannot exceed the imaginary square-shaped boundary. (Note that the restriction of the boundary was not part of the rules.)

Researchers at Stanford University were given an even more ingenious solution to this puzzle. One subject realized that it wasn't necessary to draw four lines through the centers of the dots; it could be accomplished with only three lines:

As if that weren't enough, a friend of Professor James L. Adams of Stanford provided yet another solution, which allows all nine dots to be crossed off with one straight line. All it requires is a little unblocked thinking and ingenious paper folding:

The Compulsive Smoker

Six hours. After having smoked his five cigarettes, he has another five butts, which are good for another cigarette.

In And Out Letters

The key to this problem lies not in some complex interrelationship of numbers of vowels and consonants but in the shape of the letters themselves. Letters with straight lines belong inside the circle; letters with curved lines, outside.

Loose Ends

Most people will see the difficulty as a shortness of reach. That is, they state the problem to themselves as: "How can I get to the second string?" The consequence of that is that all the creativity goes into vain efforts to find a means of making one of the strings longer. But the givens of this problem make such a solution impossible.

If, however, you define the problem as, "How can the string and I get together?" another sort of solution may occur to you. It requires that you see the difficulty in terms of getting the second string to come to you. If you tie a small object--say a key or a ring--to the end of one string and set it swinging like a pendulum, then you can grab it while holding the end of the other string in the other hand.

The Collected Works

Five inches.

If you had trouble with this one, you were probably trapped by a habitual way of visualizing. All our lives, we've been accustomed to seeing a book in a certain position--facing us, with the first page near the left-hand cover and the last page near the right-hand cover. That is the way we prepare to open a book and read. But we specified in this problem that the volumes were on the shelf. With the backs facing you, the order of pages is reversed:

In creative problem solving, it serves well to heed the rule: The more familiar the object, the harder it is to see it in another context.

The Greek Cross

This problem can be solved only if you shift one coin to a position on top of the center coin:

Not fair, you say? Sure it is. There is nothing in the directions as given that prevents you from working in more than two dimensions. In most problems of this kind, the solution involves sliding the coins from one position to another. This problem illustrates how easy it is to read into a problem constraints that are not there at all.

A Woman's Ingenuity

As long as you think of the segments of chain as four sides of a square or segments of a circle, you can't solve this problem. The moment you can shift your focus and regard the segments not as immutable structures but as stockpiles of individual links, you've made the necessary breakthrough. At the woman's suggestion, the jeweler placed three segments in a triangular pattern, took apart the remaining segment and used those three links to close the three corners of the necklace.

Most people will need to juggle the elements visually, drawing them in different arrangements before arriving at the triangular pattern that leads to a solution. This juggling of the parts of a problem results in a reorganization--but before that can happen, you have to feel free to destroy the original pattern.

Matching Triangles

Most participants begin by using three matches to form one triangle, and then try in vain to form three more from the remaining three matches.

As in the previous problem, this can be solved only by using the third dimension. Three matches can be used to build a triangle on the table and the remaining three to build a pyramid with the initial triangle as a base.

Lack of flexibility in moving from one dimension to another has been demonstrated by several experiments, among them this simple but ingenious problemsolving experiment:

A group of individuals was presented with the task of extracting a ping-pong ball from a long and narrow cylinder, which was bolted to the floor. A great variety of tools, including a hammer, pliers, a piece of string and thumbtacks, was laid out. None of these was applicable for the solution of the problem. There was, however, also a bucket of dirty water standing on the floor. About half of the individuals present finally got the idea that the ping-pong ball could be extracted by filling the cylinder with the water.

Draw Your Watch/Draw Your Steering Wheel

These exercises are illustrations of overfamiliarity. It would be difficult to think of an object most of us look at more frequently each day than our watch or steering wheel. We look at them so often that we cease to really see them.

Whenever behavior becomes automatic, or we take objects for granted, we cease to observe them--and observation is vital to creative problem solving.

It's In The Bag

The golfer reached into his pocket, extracted a book of matches, lit one and put the flame to the bag. When the bag had burned to ashes, he selected an iron, swung and watched the ball roll to the rim of the hole. Unable to get the ball away from the paper bag without a penalty, this golfer was imaginative enough to recognize that the problem could be solved by getting the paper bag away from the ball.

The reversal of problems, the purging of habitual, accepted or established ways of thinking about things has brought many important advances.

Kindred Relations

1. Bed; 2. Blue; 3. Red; 4. Soft; 5. Money; 6. Fruit; 7. Band; 8. Star; 9. Sweet; 10. Blind; 11. Cat; 12. Bed; 13. French; 14. Soap; 15. Bird; 16. Chicken; 17. Social; 18. Cold; 19. Moon; 20. Monkey; 21. Hell; 22. Dog; 23. Pigeon; 24. Chicken; 25. Black; 26. Wise; 27. Big; 28. Business; 29. Egg; 30. Evening.

Bridge The Gaps

Examples:

1. Star light day long before

2. Lemon yellow paint house dog

3. Fire escape fast run scared

4. Dog tag laundry wash white

5. Postage stamp foot sore knee

6. White wash clean face about

7. Short fall down cast out

8. Blood test paper white color

9. Light cigarette smoke screen test

10. Blue sky high jump ball

11. Hunt man gun fire house

12. Cat house light load car

13. Sleep sound sour taste bad

14. Concert piano practice teaching machine

15. Puppy love sick leave home

These series of small, conceptual steps are examples only. You may have found different and equally valid steps.

This exercise requires that you identify the steps you take in arriving at solutions. Some problems requiring a creative solution consist of a problem situation and a goal. The steps toward reaching the goal are not immediately apparent and require that you exercise your creativity. In a way, it is like building a bridge.

Word Chains

Examples:

1. Fire, fine, mine, mint

2. Love, lore, pore, port, part

3. Rise, rite, bite, bate, bath

4. Came, care, cart, dart, dirt

5. Hate, rate, rave, cave, cove, love

6. Find, fine, line, lone, lose

7. Nest, neat, meat, mean

8. Swim, slim, slip, clip

9. Give, live, like, lake, take

10. Tour, pour, pout, port, sort

11. Male, pale, pare, pore, wore, word

12. Miss, mist, mast, cast, case, base

13. Cake, bake, bale, ball, bill

14. Mean, meat, seat, sear, soar, soap

15. Pave, pare, part, tart, tort

16. Wild, mild, mile, mole, more

17. Book, boot, loot, lost, list

What's The Drift?

1. The letters EST move from the end of the initial word one letter to the left with each subsequent word.

2. The letters AR move from the beginning of the initial word to the end of the second word, and then alternately one letter to the right and one letter to the left with each subsequent word.

3. The letters TH move from the end and the beginning of the words to the center.

4. The letters ANT move the same way as in number two, but in addition, they have alternately an equal number of letters either following or preceding them:

Antagonism commandant (7)

Cantaloupe dilettante (6)

Plantation supplanted (5)

Synanthous implanting (4)

Phantasm romantic (3)

Banter shanty (2)

Ante cant (1)

5. The letters RO and OR alternate and move one letter to the right.

"It's the obvious that escapes our notice, because we have been conditioned to look for the complicated."