Filip Ilievski on bbc.com

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27 September 2024

Filip Ilievski on bbc.com: When robots can't riddle: What puzzles reveal about the depths of our own minds

AI runs unfathomable operations on billions of lines of text, handling problems that humans can't dream of solving - but you can probably still trounce them at brain teasers.

In the halls of Amsterdam's Vrije Universiteit, assistant professor Filip Ilievski is playing with artificial intelligence. It's serious business, of course, but his work can look more like children's games than hard-nosed academic research. Using some of humanity's most advanced and surreal technology, Ilievski asks AI to solve riddles.

Understanding and improving AI's ability to solve puzzles and logic problems is key to improving the technology, Ilievski says.

"As human beings, it's very easy for us to have common sense, and apply it at the right time and adapt it to new problems," says Ilievski, who describes his branch of computer science as "common sense AI". But right now, AI has a "general lack of grounding in the world", which makes that kind of basic, flexible reasoning a struggle.

But the study of AI can be about more than computers. Some experts believe that comparing how AI and human beings handle complex tasks could help unlock the secrets of our own minds.

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If you want AI to exhibit something that feels more like logical reasoning, however, you need a brand-new riddle that isn't in the training data. For a recent study (available in preprint), Ilievski and his colleagues developed a computer program that generates original rebus problems, puzzles that use combinations of pictures, symbols and letters to represent words or phrases. For example, the word "step" written in tiny text next to a drawing of four men could mean "one small step for man".

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According to Ilievski, there's no accepted taxonomy that breaks down what all of the various different kinds of logic and reasoning are, whether you're dealing with a human thinker or a machine. That makes it difficult to pick apart how AI fares on different kinds of problems.

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That's why the best systems may come from a combination of AI and human work; we can play to the machine's strengths, Ilievski says. But when we want to compare AI and the human mind, it's important to remember "there is no conclusive research providing evidence that humans and machines approach puzzles in a similar vein", he says. In other words, understanding AI may not give us any direct insight into the mind, or vice versa.

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