1.14285714 is Google’s answer when you search for eight days of a week. On the first glance, this doesn’t make any sense whatsoever. However, with some clever deduction, you’ll find that it apparently uses days and week as durations, so days a week would be 7. So 8 of 7 is then the result you can see up there. I think it is very interesting that this Google Calculator output appears funny and a bit confusing to us humans. We’re not expecting to get a floating point number as a result to this query, yet Google’s pattern matching happily identifies a proper formula it can use and number-crunches away.

Although this is just a small oddity that is not even a bug in Google, it is a good example for a much deeper running, fundamental problem not only the big search engine providers have to fight with: How do we recognize what is important in a statement? What is its likely purpose? How can we distinguish the purpose of a query such as eight days a week from five feet in meters? Calling these questions difficult would let a good opportunity to use the phrase hardest problem of our time go to waste. Okey, I know this is an exaggeration, but as far as AI problems are concerned, it gets close.

The definition of understanding is not straight forward, many definitions involve the words concepts,  classification, relationship, awareness and abstraction. In AI, it is often the background knowledge which is the problem. You need to have sufficient background knowledge to understand what is going on, what is meant, what is not meant, or that nothing is meant at all. I think especially this last type of understanding is hard: without a concept of “nonsense”, we’ll have to use the process of elimination to find out that none of the existing concepts fit in our case. I’m quite sure that it will take very long before a computer is able to find the (admittedly overused) picture on the left funny. Even if we discount the difficulty of image recognition, which has an even longer way to go still.

I’m not an expert on the field of natural language processing, but I bet Google employs hordes of the finest minds in this area to cope with the problem of ambiguity, meaning and the understanding of short utterances. No doubt they (and all the other search engine providers) have the best algorithms in existence to get a glimpse on the thoughts their users. While the search engines get smarter and smarter, the steps taken are still only very small and on the lowest slopes of the huge mountains ahead on the path to true artificial understanding, distillation of meaning, and thus artificial general intelligence. The problem is far from solved, and thus my AI Panic Level decreases a bit, say by -1.14285714%. A lot of people are working on it, but progress is slow, and it won’t get any easier soon. Maybe the semantic web and - dare I say it - web 3.0 will help. But that’s a story for another time.

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