
Software Is Smart Enough for SAT, but Still Far from Intelligent - aburan28
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/21/technology/personaltech/software-is-smart-enough-for-sat-but-still-far-from-intelligent.html
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Animats
It's impressive seeing all the recent progress.

I went through Stanford in the 1980s, when the "expert systems" crowd had
reached the "emperor has no clothes" state and the "AI winter" was starting.
Three decades later, AI has become un-stuck, and there's real progress every
year. The next decade is going to be interesting.

Fifty years out, the machines will be in charge, but I won't live that long.

~~~
farresito
You might live to see it, given the amount of research that is starting to be
put into anti-aging therapies. Biology is gonna go through an amazing
revolution in the next few decades, so be optimistic.

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aconz2
Read the title and had a different SAT in mind before reading the article --
pretty funny.

~~~
wonkaWonka
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satya_Nadella](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satya_Nadella)?

~~~
thaumasiotes
Presumably 3-SAT (
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boolean_satisfiability_problem...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boolean_satisfiability_problem#3-satisfiability)
)

Obviously, software is not actually smart enough for SAT ;)

This is kind of an interesting case, in that the article, contradicting the
headline, says that the software was only given some "geometry questions" from
the SAT, and that it only performed at the level of an average 11th grader,
which is shockingly bad. Writing the software to solve SAT geometry problems
with perfect accuracy isn't difficult at all, so what's being tested here is
the ability to parse visual diagrams and natural English sentences into an
accurate representation of the problem. (Again, this is made clear in the
article, but seems basically unrelated to the headline.)

But since that's what we're doing, I don't see why we don't give it the verbal
questions too. Understanding written English sentences is most of what's left
there.

