Narrative Augmented Reasoning Challenges
NARC is a kind of abstract reasoning puzzle. Each puzzle presents a sequence of colored grids that tell a visual "story." One or more grids in the sequence are hidden, and your goal is to reconstruct them pixel-perfectly.
The catch: the grids alone aren't enough. Each puzzle comes with a short narrative clue. The clue never mentions grids; it helps only when read figuratively, a character as a bar, a mood as its height. Without it, the missing grid is ambiguous — several answers seem plausible. With it, one answer is right.
This is the NARC property: neither the grids nor the narrative suffice alone, but together they determine the answer. For AI models we measure it directly: a puzzle has the property for a given model when that model solves it with grids and clue together but not with either alone.
Color-blind? The Numbers button in the top bar prints each color's digit in every cell.
NARC asks a narrow question: can a short story supply what a sequence of pictures leaves undetermined, and when it does, which part of the story is doing the work — its words, its order, or its form? For AI models we can test this with ablations: swap the clue for its keywords, shuffle the grids, hide a different grid, tell the same story a different way.
The human side is different. People solve puzzles on this site for fun, and we record those attempts anonymously, but we have not run a human study and make no claims about human difficulty or about how humans and models differ. That comparison is future work.
NARC is a sibling project to MARC2 (Metaphor Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus), which explored how figurative language helps AI solve abstract reasoning tasks from the ARC-AGI benchmark.
This site began as a research proof of concept and is now used by visitors as well as by our team. Not everything on it carries the same weight.
Another 314 puzzles are drafts under review and visible only to the team.
Puzzles come from three sources, labelled on every card: Human-written by our team or visitors, AI-generated by a language model working from a strategy prompt or as an autonomous agent, or AI + human, an AI draft revised by a person. Every active puzzle was approved by a reviewer and then run through the model battery.
Puzzles span literary classics (Hemingway, Kafka, Shelley), scientific concepts (natural selection, entropy, plate tectonics), philosophical thought experiments (the trolley problem, Plato's cave, the ship of Theseus), and more.
NARC draws on:
Participant information for the NARC study (University of Idaho IRB 26-225). Adults, 18 or older, only; we do not ask your age.
What you do. Solving: reconstruct a hidden grid, before and after reading the story, 2 to 15 minutes per puzzle. Creating: draw a sequence of grids and write its story, 15 to 60 minutes. Narrating (by invitation): write a story for a puzzle, test it against an AI model, revise, 20 to 90 minutes.
What is recorded. When you solve a puzzle we store the grids you submit, whether they were correct, whether you had revealed the story, and how long you took, under a random session id kept in your browser. Page actions (reveals, submits, retries) are logged the same way. Votes are stored with a random id kept in your browser and your IP address, used only to limit repeat voting and deleted after 30 days. If you submit a puzzle, we store the puzzle and, only if you enter one, the name you want to be credited by. In Narrating we store every story you submit, when, how long you spent, whether you had viewed the existing story, the model's full response, a random participant id, and the shared invite code you used (which tells us which event or mailing you came from). We do not ask for your email or anything else about you.
How it is used and shared. Puzzles and stories you create may be published here with their answers and model results, in research papers, and in public datasets, word for word. A puzzle is credited by the name its contributor entered, or as by an anonymous contributor if none was entered; Narrate stories are never credited and invite codes are never published. Solving records are released only with hashed session ids and no IP addresses. Records are kept indefinitely as part of the published benchmark.
Risks and benefits. No greater than solving or writing a puzzle for a magazine. The main ones are that something you wrote is published in a way you did not expect, and, if you chose to be credited, that your name appears publicly with your puzzle; the notices on each page are meant to make both clear before you submit. No direct benefit beyond the puzzles; the research benefit is a public, human-authored benchmark.
Voluntary and confidential. Taking part is voluntary; stop at any time by leaving the site. Participation is unrelated to any course, grade, or employment. Data live in a database on a University of Idaho server behind a login; Narrate data are kept in a separate database that only the principal investigator can read. Credit names are visible to the principal investigator and team reviewers before a puzzle is published, and publicly once it is.
Why records cannot be removed. We do not record who you are, so we have no way to tell which records are yours, and we cannot remove a person's records after they are submitted. If you do not want something recorded, do not submit it. The one exception: if you published a puzzle under a name, you can ask the principal investigator to remove the name or withdraw the puzzle.
Questions. Contact Bert Baumgaertner, University of Idaho, bbaum@uidaho.edu. Questions about your rights as a participant: University of Idaho Office of Research Assurances, irb@uidaho.edu, 208-885-6340.
A paper describing the masking battery and its results is under review (September 2026). A citation and a data release will be posted here when they exist. Until then, please cite the site by URL and date.
Code: github.com/bertybaums/narc.