Outside of the lies your mother told you after the Year 8 Sports Day relay race, First prize is always better than Second. But nobody is talking about the first place winner of the Best Optical Illusion of the Year contest, because we're all too busy being freaked out by the cylinder-rectangle illusion that won second place.
The "Ambiguous Cylinder Illusion" by Kokichi Sugihara shows a series of cylinders and cuboids being transformed into other-cylinders-and-cuboids in a mirror. The only problem is, the video never actually shows us how it works.
Maybe this is why the illusion has 70x more video views than the first place winner - footage of a Gabor element moving - which can be viewed here. The Best Illusion of the Year Contest is run by the Neural Correlate Society (NCS) and judged by Stephen Macknik, an American neuroscientist and science writer, who is just going to accept he was wrong this time.
Long live the rightful king, HRH Ambigious Cylinders.
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