
Best Illusion of the Year Contest - yters
http://illusioncontest.neuralcorrelate.com/
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nopassrecover
The top 3 are great.

I love the magnet like slopes - it's one that just makes you go "wow". Reminds
me somewhat of the James Dyson "Wrong Garden" illusion as discussed previously
on HN (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=779555>, comments of thread
discuss how to see a short video of it).

The "counter-intuitive illusory contours" one is interesting. It is almost as
though our brain is treating the image as a liquid, and imagining distortion
waves ahead of the "collision point".

The sine wave one is interesting in that you no longer notice the effect if
you are reading the text below it (i.e not focusing on the wave beyond your
periphery). This is somewhat similar to the "spinning dancer" illusion
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spinning_Dancer>) in which you can trick
your mind to see the illusion in different ways, and sometimes have difficulty
seeing it again as you did originally.

In my related searches, found this site:
<http://yloveillusions.com/en/category/uncategorized/page/5/> which has some
other interesting illusions. Particularly like the "A bottle disappears" one.

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reappear
The ramp video is fun, but i don't think it belongs in the same bin as other
"optical illusions".

Yes, visual cortex failed, and it failed where a god would succeed (succeed in
finding the simplest interpretation and making a sharp bet on that
interpretation). But the most surprising optical illusions present a far lower
bar which visual cortex then still fails to clear.

Often, they exploit what must be some specific implementation detail of visual
cortex.

Often, they feel really weird from the inside. Sometimes they force competing
interpretations, sometimes a single interpretation which turns out to be
obviously wrong.

So i guess it's probably right to insist that an inference engine's optical
illusions be a subset of its koans. At my level, the ramps are no koan, just a
(funny and clever) lie.

