Scientists Came Up With 1,000 Questions That Stump Computers

In 2011, America's favorite quiz show, Jeopardy!, exposed viewers to what was for many their first brush with artificial intelligence when IBM's Watson faced off against two of the show's greatest champions, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. Watson stumbled a bit on the first day but dominated day two and ended the three-round competition with more than three times its opponents' winnings. "I, for one, welcome our new computer overlords," Jennings wrote on his video screen after Watson's win. While artificial intelligence has developed tremendously since then and AI assistants like Siri and Alexa have proliferated in our pockets and homes, there are still plenty of scenarios where these assistants don't seem so smart. A team of researchers at the University of Maryland capitalized on this in an article published in the 2019 issue of the journal Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, creating a set of questions that stumped computers in order to learn more about how they think -- and perhaps teach them to think even better.