Sounds like "geoguesser" players who learn to recognize google street view pictures from a specific country by looking at the color of the google street view car or a specific piece of dirt on the camera lens.
Yeah, there's also an likely apocryphal story about tanks and machine learning: https://gwern.net/tank
The more you work with large-scale ML systems the more you develop an intuition for these kinds of properties. If you work a lot with debugging models and training data, or even just dimensionality reduction and matrix factorization, you begin to realize that many features are highly correlated with each other, often being close to scaled linear.