Yes Steve, you are right, that is pretty close to the ‘secret sauce’. And yet, don’t humans do about the same thing when they answer similar questions?

I taught the AI that some symbols (words) represent countable units. Countable units can be compared, and can have a; =,>,< relationship. When that relationship deals with age, the smallest units are youngest and oldest are the largest.

If you believe this is thinking or not is much more based on your philosophy than absolute truth. We may never know everything that goes into a human thought, and all machines might ever do is emulate the process.

I had kindof hoped it was doing something clever with dynamically using the words “old” and “young” and “-est” without explicitly being programmed with those words.
In any case, I don’t think questions involving numbers can help prove general intelligence. Counting and math are very specific systems. If they were part of natural intelligence, kids would not have to spend 8 years in school to get the basics right. I would go so far as to say that math is nothing but a set of rules that we are taught to follow. Our teachers might as well have hard-coded them into our brains.

Don Patrick - Jun 23, 2013:

I had kindof hoped it was doing something clever with dynamically using the words “old” and “young” and “-est” without explicitly being programmed with those words..

Skynet-AI is doing it dynamically. The words “youngest” and “oldest” don’t actually exist in the AI. Neither do the proper names or the words “twenty one” or “thirty nine”. I think it is pretty clever too.