Google and interestingly enough, investment banker Goldman Sachs use different kinds of brainy riddles in their interviews to assess the analytical nature of the applicant’s mind. Although it cannot be done completely by most people, the approach used is all that matters as it takes sufficient amount of intelligence to arrive at that conclusion. So, it does help your chances to get in Google if you are good at riddles and such a difficult one at that. We are also seeing a record number of robots being used by the company in manufacturing and even design department. So, can a robot solve that riddle to land a job?
Google’s Deepmind AI project has developed an algorithm that could work its way through the entire difficulty of the riddle and come out with the solution. Here is the famous riddle:
“An executioner lines up 100 prisoners single file and puts a red or a blue hat on each prisoner’s head. Every prisoner can see the hats of the people in front of him in the line – but not his own hat, nor those of anyone behind him. [There is also an unknown number of red or blue hats]
The executioner starts at the end (back) and asks the last prisoner the colour of his hat. He must answer “red” or “blue.” If he answers correctly, he is allowed to live. If he gives the wrong answer, he is killed instantly and silently. While everyone hears the answer, no one knows whether an answer was right.
On the night before the line-up, the prisoners confer on a strategy to help them. What should they do?”
Now it’s easy to come up with quick fix solutions, but none of them arrive at the correct answer. There is a system which the prisoners can adopt as a result of which 99 of the prisoners can save their lives while the hundredth person has a fifty-fifty chance. It involves seeing the hats in front of you and alerting the next prisoner about the number and colors. Now the solution isn’t important here, and the detailed study can be seen here. What is extraordinary is that AI was abe to achieve entirely on its own. It involves communication and signalling of the color in front of each entity and it’s altogether a different kind of intelligence than a human one. The AIs often need more information and integration with other AI platforms to function effectively as seen in the case of self-driving cars. Hopefully, AI will be able to do a lot more independent work in the future other than mind games and riddles.
