You're telling me.

(Coming from somebody who is currently stuck only on improving performance and is getting increasingly closer to smashing my head through the wall)

Thanks for your feedback!

I can see where you're coming from. I feel like the definition of a Kata is hardly clear, and is still evolving. When creating a Kata, one of the "Disciplines" is Puzzles: "Code that is fun to play and involves solving puzzles that may not be strictly programming challenges." There are several Kata already on here that are not really difficult to program, it's just finding the "secret" that's a challenge. This is very similar in that respect, but in a way, each of the rules could be a Kata on their own. (And some of them are. hint hint) If there were just a single one for each test, this wouldn't be much of a puzzle at all; it is the particular combination that makes it interesting to try and figure out what rule does what.

But you are right that implementing a decoder for each one is much easier than figuring out what you need to do. That's kind of the point, though. I think this is the perfect example of a puzzle for people who like mental challenges, but aren't necessarily experts at math or programming. (Like many of the 4 kyu and up Kata demand.)

Furthermore, programming skills are not limited to knowledge of a particular language. Logical reasoning skills play a huuuuge role when programming in any language, particular when you're trying to troubleshoot a bug. I get that it's a little outside of the box, but I think there is value in training logic skills even without challenging programming, and that it will improve your programming in a subtle way. On a side note, I don't think there is anywhere more suitable for this kind of puzzle. (I mean really, what are you going to do, give someone ten choices and then have them guess which one of those was used to encode the text? That would be boring and easy. It's much more interesting and rewarding to solve off of a blank slate!)

No. When red and green chameleons meet, they can both change their colors to blue (third color). I'll try to clarify this in description, thanks.

List shouldn't necesseraly contain 3 elements. In real test there is no such rule. More importantly, if your solution passed all the test, then it would most likely pass tests will one or two elements.

With one element it is possible, just sounds silly ("which one of these differs from others?"). With two elements there are two correct answers (1 and 2), while real IQ tests usually have one answer. Then again, correct test should accept either of two answers in this case.

Idea of the kata is to help Vasya solve real IQ test. Keep this in mind!

1. List shouldn't necesseraly contain 3 elements. In real test there is no such rule. More importantly, if your solution passed all the test, then it would most likely pass tests will one or two elements.
2. In real IQ tests indexes are 1-based. As you probably know, we dont count elements starting from 0 in the real life. :)
3. I will take this one under consideration :)

Thank you for the feedback :)