Artificial intelligence: ARC test focus goes beyond factoid questions

"Common sense" is a phrase everyone hears at one time or another, usually from an angry bystander who think you don't have any. "Humans use common sense to fill in the gaps of any question they are posed, delivering answers within an understood but non-explicit context," Swapna Krishna wrote in Engadget. Add a few years of developmental growth in the young child, and he or she acquires common sense but AI has problems. Calling out the challenge in AI research is Dr. Oren Etzioni, researcher and professor, who leads the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, or AI2, in Seattle, Washington. To get at the fluidity that people have, their natural ability to move from one thing to the next, the programs need what every ten year old has in spades, he said, and that is called common sense---a set of facts, heuristics, observations, all the things that we can bring to the table, but the computer does not.