In India, there’s been a move away from simple questions about general knowledge towards complex questions which take a combination of general knowledge and deduction.
Deductive questions would probably be harder for a computer program than general knowledge questions, and inventing good deductive questions would be a lot harder.
There is a very popular Russian TV game show “What? Where? When?” (there is also a competitive version of the game that is played by a lot of people (a lot of questions are available here, you can use machine translation to get the idea what they are like)) whose questions require even more lateral thinking and intuition than those of Indian quizzes. A few episodes are available on youtube. There even was a short-lived US version (which slightly differs from original game) of “What? Where? When?” called “Million dollar mind game”, but somehow it failed to gain popularity in the US.
It made a huge influence on quizzing culture in ex-communist countries. Most pub quizzes (even those that are completely unrelated to the competitive version of “What? Where? When?”) at least attempt to set up their questions in such a way that it is possible to work out the answer to a given question using clues that are hidden within that question itself.
However, the pool of questions suitable for humans seems to be somewhat larger than the pool of questions that would be suitable for computer programs, because very often the fact that deduction and lateral thinking are necessary to solve a particular question rely on question being based on very obscure facts that players are unlikely to know. In some (but not all) cases a computer program might be able to find the answer in a very large database, instead of trying to work out the answer from clues hidden within a question itself, which, I think, is the goal.
Posting to register my great admiration for “Что? Где? Когда?” It was a great show, and was a part of what inspired me as a kid to get into math/science. A lot of the contestants were very smart grad students, as I recall. I am very sad there isn’t such a show in the Western world, it’s all of the form of “* got talent” which is about picking entertainers, or “Jeopardy” which is about silly trivia. :(
KVN is also partly about wit/quick thinking, of course. My hometown’s KVN team (“the Odessa gentlemen”) was universally feared :).
Quiz culture in India
In India, there’s been a move away from simple questions about general knowledge towards complex questions which take a combination of general knowledge and deduction.
Deductive questions would probably be harder for a computer program than general knowledge questions, and inventing good deductive questions would be a lot harder.
There is a very popular Russian TV game show “What? Where? When?” (there is also a competitive version of the game that is played by a lot of people (a lot of questions are available here, you can use machine translation to get the idea what they are like)) whose questions require even more lateral thinking and intuition than those of Indian quizzes. A few episodes are available on youtube. There even was a short-lived US version (which slightly differs from original game) of “What? Where? When?” called “Million dollar mind game”, but somehow it failed to gain popularity in the US.
It made a huge influence on quizzing culture in ex-communist countries. Most pub quizzes (even those that are completely unrelated to the competitive version of “What? Where? When?”) at least attempt to set up their questions in such a way that it is possible to work out the answer to a given question using clues that are hidden within that question itself.
However, the pool of questions suitable for humans seems to be somewhat larger than the pool of questions that would be suitable for computer programs, because very often the fact that deduction and lateral thinking are necessary to solve a particular question rely on question being based on very obscure facts that players are unlikely to know. In some (but not all) cases a computer program might be able to find the answer in a very large database, instead of trying to work out the answer from clues hidden within a question itself, which, I think, is the goal.
Posting to register my great admiration for “Что? Где? Когда?” It was a great show, and was a part of what inspired me as a kid to get into math/science. A lot of the contestants were very smart grad students, as I recall. I am very sad there isn’t such a show in the Western world, it’s all of the form of “* got talent” which is about picking entertainers, or “Jeopardy” which is about silly trivia. :(
KVN is also partly about wit/quick thinking, of course. My hometown’s KVN team (“the Odessa gentlemen”) was universally feared :).