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Weird Organism

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Section 2, session 7. Discussed together with Rearranged Triangle; the same session starts the group lab on Dominoes.

The problem

Reconstructed from the syllabus: only the title survives, so the exercise below is the editors' own, in the form the evidence makes most likely — a familiar organism described so plainly that a stereotype hides it.

A naturalist from somewhere very far away sends these notes on an organism they have never met, and asks you what it is.

It is among the largest organisms in its habitat, yet by mass almost entirely dead: a living film a few cells thick lies beneath a coat of dead armour, and nearly everything within is dead tissue the organism keeps and builds upon. It grows only at its tips and in girth, never lengthening in the middle. It eats air, using light to do so, and drinks through the parts of itself buried in the ground. It never moves from where it began life, and may live for centuries. Some kinds recruit mobile animals to carry their offspring away.

In your GamesWorth notebook, before class:

  1. What is it? Name the class of things, not one species.
  2. Mark every sentence that made you picture something exotic, and beside each write the assumption it violated.
  3. Describe some living thing you see daily — yourself is allowed — so that a friend cannot identify it in under a minute.

Why it is in the course

Section 2 is six sessions on creative blocks, and session 7 is the perceptual-blocks session, read against Adams's Chapter 2. Winfree paired three exercises whose names all point at the gap between what is in front of you and what you perceive. What the other two were is an inference from those names: the Rearranged Triangle is probably a dissection figure in which the eye supplies a straight edge that is not there, and the Dominoes lab possibly the mutilated chessboard, where a hidden property of the board decides which tilings can exist. The Weird Organism puts a stereotype between you and a plain description: Adams's first perceptual block is seeing what you expect to see, and "organism" summons something animal-sized and mobile.

The point was never the identification. Winfree wrote that the puzzles, "many of them silly", exist "to slow you down for a few minutes so you can examine the working of your own mind", and that "actually solving the practice problems is way less important than learning how to try". What you bring to class is the inventory of assumptions you caught yourself making.

Where it comes from

The problem is known from one document only: Winfree's course handout for EEB 479/479H/579, transcribed here as the syllabus, where "discuss Weird Organism" opens session 7. Solo problems went out a week ahead, so it was handed over at session 6. The sheet he handed out for the problem has never been found, on his archived pages or anywhere else, so the title is all that survives. Like most of the course's puzzles it was most likely his own, "contrived much as the organizers of an Easter Egg Hunt do".

The title points at an old trick: describing the familiar as a stranger would see it, as in the Sphinx's riddle or Horace Miner's "Body Ritual among the Nacirema" (1956). Its visual cousin is the hidden figure, whose type specimen is a puzzle-picture published in the American Journal of Psychology in 1951 and commonly reproduced as the "Dallenbach cow": an animal most viewers cannot find, and then cannot un-see.

Hints
  • Separate observation from interpretation: underline every word that is already a conclusion — "eats", "armour", "dead" — and rewrite it as the bare thing an observer would see.
  • Notice what "organism" made you picture, then deliberately try the other kingdoms of life, and other scales of size and time.
  • Test the notes against the nearest living things: yourself, a pet, a houseplant, whatever grows on the wall outside.
  • Check any candidate against every sentence, especially the ones that fit badly; one that explains most of the notes is a hypothesis, not an answer.
Resolution

For the reconstructed example only. Winfree's own answer is not known.

The notes describe a tree, and more broadly any woody perennial plant. The dead armour is bark, the living film is cambium and phloem, the wood within is mostly dead xylem the tree keeps and builds on; growth is at shoot and root tips and, in girth, at the cambium; eating air by light is photosynthesis; the recruited animals are pollinators and seed dispersers. Every clause is meant to be literally true of some ordinary tree, and the exotic creature came from the reader's stereotype of an organism as an animal. What belongs in the notebook is not the word "tree" but the assumptions that delayed it.

Sources

  • Arthur T. Winfree, The Art of Scientific Discovery (EEB 479/479H/579): course handout and retrospective syllabus (2001) — Internet Archive capture 🔓
  • James L. Adams, Conceptual Blockbusting: A Guide to Better Ideas, Chapter 2 "Perceptual Blocks" (Fifth Edition, 2019) — publisher page 🔒
  • James L. Adams, Conceptual Blockbusting: A Guide to Better Ideas, 3rd edition (1986) — Internet Archive 🔓 (borrow)
  • John Rader Platt, The Excitement of Science (1962), containing "The Art of Creative Thinking" — Internet Archive 🔓 (borrow)
  • Horace Miner, "Body Ritual among the Nacirema", American Anthropologist 58(3), 503–507 (1956) — DOI 🔒
  • Karl M. Dallenbach, "A Puzzle-Picture with a New Principle of Concealment", American Journal of Psychology 64(3), 431–433 (1951) — DOI 🔒
  • Wikipedia contributors, "Ambiguous image" (overview) — Wikipedia 🔓
  • Wikipedia contributors, "Platypus" (overview, for the 1799 specimens) — Wikipedia 🔓
  • Arthur T. Winfree, The Art of Scientific Discovery: original course syllabus (2001) — PDF 🔓

How sure are we that this is Winfree's problem?

Not at all: the identification is unknown. The syllabus gives the name, the session and its two neighbours, and nothing else; searches on the exact phrase, on Adams's chapter, on puzzle collections and across Winfree's archived site found no text. Both session-mates are "what you see is not what is there" puzzles, which makes a perceptual-block exercise about an organism likely, but its form is open. The 2002 and 2007 captures of the handout are word for word the same, so nothing fuller is online.

  • A written "identify this organism" puzzle, the form reconstructed above. It fits Adams's stereotyping block and the course rule that exercises "depend as little as possible on knowledge of any particular subject area", but no text has been found.
  • A hidden or ambiguous picture of an animal, in the family of Dallenbach's cow. It would sit beside the Rearranged Triangle naturally, but a picture is hard to work on for a week.
  • A "could such an organism exist?" thought experiment, asking which assumptions about living things are necessary and which are habit. Nothing beyond the title supports it.
  • A real organism that looks impossible, the stock case being the platypus, whose first specimens in Britain were judged in 1799 to be a fake sewn together from several animals. Against it: the schedule lists readings and anecdotes bare — Golden Tooth, N-Rays, the Barometer Story — but puts "discuss" in front of the problems students worked on for a week, and this one carries it.

If the handout ever surfaces, this page should be rewritten around it.

Back to Section 2 · All problems · The schedule

Machine-readable: this page as Markdown · raw source on GitHub · llms.txt · llms-full.txt (whole site). See For AI agents.