| A Bongard problem is a kind of puzzle invented by the Soviet computer scientist Mikhail Moiseevich
Bongard, probably in the mid-1960s. They were published in his eponymous 1967 book on pattern recognition, which became known in English translation from 1970. Bongard in the
introduction to the book, which deals with a number of topics including perceptrons, credits the ideas in it to a group including M. N. Vainstvaig, V. V. Maksimov, and M. S. Smirnov.
The idea of a Bongard problem is to present two sets of relatively simple diagrams, say A and B. All the
diagrams from set A have a common factor or attribute, which is lacking in
all the diagrams of set B. The problem is to find or formulate, convincingly, the common factor.
The problems were relevant to the early days of machine
learning. They were popularised by their occurrence in the 1979 book Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas
Hofstadter, himself a composer of Bongard problems.
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