Help out a robot

Mockup of a Captcha test, with an image divided into 16 squares from a Five Andrews performance. Text reads: elect all squares with men in dresses. If there are none, click skip.

We selfishly assume robots are there to help us. But sometimes we can help a robot too.

Especially with the stuff they traditionally find really hard.

One of our robot correspondents (we shall call him ‘nicbot’) posted us this picture with the question “which squares have men in dresses?” He didn’t explain why he wanted to know, but we do realise that robots can find this kind of thing quite challenging. So we thought we would try to help him out to try and make the world a better place for everyone, robots included.

But now we’re taking a look, we’re not sure we can find any men in dresses at all. None whatsoever.

Here, you have a go and help a robot in a dress.

[Ed: ‘a robot in distress.’ ‘It’ not ‘he’] [No, Ed. We looked up the robot on social and he is wearing a dress and is a he/him]

Try these 6 levels to warm up your skills in case they’ve suddenly gone cold.

Level 1: Select all squares containing Zurich.

Level 2: Select all blue squares

Level 4: Select all squares containing The Five Andrews

Level 5: Select all squares containing men in dresses

Answers on reverse.

Answers also copied below, in case you’re still using an old operating system you can’t turn over to look at the answers.

Level 1: If you selected 0 - 15 squares: You are a yoghurt from the ‘70s. 16 or more: You are Toblerone.

Level 2: 0 - 8: It’s a sign. Is that you, Yves Klein? 9 or more: How alarming, it’s Derek Jarman!

Level 3: There is no level 3: Unless, just possibly, you are John Malkovich.

Level 4: We do not comment on matters of national obscurity.

Level 5: Bon sang! Ce ne sont pas des « robes »! Ils sont « vêtements de performance »! We’d like to make that clear to our relations who found their fortune, somewhat at our expense we feel, with a number containing the lines

The only reason you boys do all that performing is

So you can wear a dress

To which we wrote a hit riposte for the chanteuse Françoise Hardy to sing on her album Träume, retrospectively

Au contraire, chèr cousin au troisième degré enlevé deux fois.

Notre mission est vraiment plus futile que cela.

which was never recorded as we forgot to put a stamp on our postcard to Françoise and so our story was never heard…

At least… not until now, after one of our robot correspondents posted us this picture with the question “which squares have men in dresses?”