I’m currently living and teaching in Zürich until the end of the year,

.. here in the heart of Switzerland. I’m teaching for this semester at the University of Zürich–and you only get one guess as to what I’m teaching. That’s right, I’m here to teach the course on Human-Computer Interaction and AI over the 14-week semester.

(In other words, what should we be doing to design and build AI systems so that people can understand and use them. Hence last week’s Challenge about getting LLMs to be useful in search tasks.)

But as a person who’s relatively new to Switzerland, I’ve found a few things that are charming and puzzling at the same time. Can you help me figure out what’s going on in each of these cases?

1. Why are these eggs colored orange/yellow? I bought them in the local grocery store where they were sitting out on the shelf, unrefrigerated. The label on the container says Schweizer Eier (Swiss eggs). I’ve seen many different colored eggs from friends who have chickens (blue, green, brown, some with spots), still, this is extraordinary color. But what’s the story here? What kind of chicken would produce these eggs?

2. While on a hike in the Alps (near Rigi Scheidegg, if that helps), I came across this flag–and I have no idea what kind of a flag this is. What does it represent? (It might help to know that the Swiss are a little flag-crazy. There is traditional Swiss flag-tossing (a kind of bucolic, even serene sport… watch the video), and flags seem to abound. Given the level of vexillological interest here, it must signify something, but what?

3. I’ve seen some interesting vegetables before in farmer’s markets before, but this one seems very Seussian to me. What ARE these things? How would I eat one?

Of course, we want to know how you found the answers to each Challenge. Share your search tricks with us!

Keep searching!