Tuesday, April 05, 2005
Test your animal knowledge.
1. How do you put a giraffe into a refrigerator?


















The correct answer is: Open the refrigerator, put in the giraffe, and
close the door.
(This question tests whether you tend to do simple things in an overly
complicated way.)


2 . How do you put an elephant into a refrigerator?














Did you say, Open the refrigerator, put in the elephant, and close the
refrigerator?!

Wrong Answer.

Correct Answer: Open the refrigerator, take out the giraffe, put in
the elephant, and close the door. (This tests your ability to think
through the repercussions of your previous actions.)


3. The Lion King is hosting an animal conference. All the animals are
invited, and all attend... except one ..


Which animal does not attend?
















Correct Answer: The Elephant. The elephant is in the refrigerator.
You just put him in there.

(This tests your memory.)


4. There is a river you must cross, but it is inhabited by crocodiles,
and you do not have a boat. How do you manage it?






















Correct Answer: You jump into the river and swim across. Have you not
been listening? All the crocodiles are attending the Animal Meeting. (This
tests whether you learn quickly from your mistakes.)

According to Anderson Consulting Worldwide, around 90% of the
professionals they tested got all questions wrong, but many preschoolers got several
correct answers.


1 Comments:

Blogger michael.dufel said...

The beauty of advanced human cognition is the ability to consider factors not explicitly specified. This is a huge problem for artificial intelliegence. This is why computers are stupid.

Example:
The wonderful human mind takes into account the appropriate limiting factors in solving a task. The adult mind takes into account some constraints such as the relative size of the giraffe to a refrigerator. The child's mind takes into account that a refrigerator has a door. The typical adult mind identifies more constraining factors than a child. This type of cognitive ability is difficult for computers, which do not have to ability to identify constraints for new situations. This is one of the reasons why artificial intelligence is so hard to do.

Now figure this, it says in the Bible that we need to have "faith as a little child." This is a very hard verse for me because I will NEVER have that kind of faith. It has been my experience of late that faith and reason operate in a similar way to the uncertainty principle in quantum mechanics. The more you zoom in on faith, the further you get from reason. The more you zoom in on reason, the more faith becomes elusive. Can you have both? I would say that you can choose a middle ground between faith and reason, but you can't have perfect faith and perfect reason in this life. The only exception to this rule is Jesus, because the rules of this universe do not apply to God.

Post a Comment

<< Home