T H I N K

If the connection between two ideas requires more than one logical step, most people have no confidence in its truth.

They trust their brake peddle to stop their car. They ride in airplanes and press the up button in an elevator. All of which relies upon dozens of logical operators strung together in what really looks like a long and tenuous chain of logic. But people's experience with these things are positive, because of course, logic is reliable no matter how tenuous it may look to a logical novice.

On the other hand, people's experience with what other people pose as logic is disastrous. It usually ends up in complete failure. It almost never turns out the way the posed logic predicted. This is not because the logic failed, but because the novice logician was inept.

None the less, most people, being novice to logic themselves, confuse the origin of the error, being unaware of their every day life and death reliance upon complex logic, presuming instead that the fault is in the imprecise nature of logic, not the person incorrectly applying logic.

Few have ever experienced an actual valid logical restatement of a resolvable task.

Don't Feel Intimidated
Start out slow and simple. Below is an example of very simple play. The first guesses identify which colors are present then proceed to pin point which place each color resides.

Practice play like this. Your brain will quickly begin to adapt better and more informative strategies. These "strategies" are not strategies for gaming, but strategies for applying fundamental rules of logic to any task. Your brain is adapting rational methodology.

Click "Play." The computer will select a sequence of four colors, each color of which is any of the six colors shown. This sequence is hidden before you can see it. Your task is to logically predict this sequence. That is -to guess it.

Click the colors under each of the four places. Then click "Guess." The computer will give you information about your guess. How many of the colors you picked are in the right place, how many are the right color, but in the wrong place and how many are just completely wrong. But it won't tell you which is which.

Use this information to inform your next guess.

The answers are not obvious. This game is about inferring the logical connections between abstract concepts. If A is true and B is false, then what is C, true or false? If only one color in my first guess is the correct color, does that mean none of the other colors are in the answer? Learning how to think logically applies to all ideas and concepts, from rocket science to politics.

If you think logically, each game should take you between 10 and 15 minutes. And you should consistently take no more than five guesses.

Watch the computer play. "Numerical" is numerical brute force. The computer is doing what a computer does best. Solving by trying all the combinations. Computer science calls this "brute force." Something at which computers are very good.

"Rational" however is not native to a computer at all. The computer is programmed to think like you or me. It takes time and considers different moves before deciding on the best guess. It doesn't try to pick the right answer at first. Instead it tries to guess a color combination that will tell it most about what the right answer might actually be. The rational engine is not even on your machine right now. It is on a server and your computer is only responding to it's guesses. So it actually doesn't even have access to the answer at all.

The AI (artificial intelligence) is actually thinking about the problem in the same way you or I should think about it.

Watch its progress bar. And notice as it studies different color combinations before it selects one. It is considering which guess will tell it most about what colors are in the answer.

The AI is not a computer program running on your computer. It resides on the server and actually doesn't know nor even have access to the answer. It is thinking just about the same way and just as fast as you or I, but it is likely thinking better. It usually gets the right answer in four or five guesses. Can you do that well?

General AI does not yet exist. The first computer programmer to stumble across it will certainly win the Nobel Prize. This AI like all other current AI is specialized for one task. General AI will be able to carry on a conversation with you and you won't know it is a computer.