The problem is interesting but you can view it in so many ways, many of which are contradictory. Everyone applied theory of mind to make assumptions about what was or was not implied about the scope of the problem. The obvious lesson here is that we should never try to apply our own theory of (human) mind to an AI mind but this is too harsh on the participants as the problem solver was definitely not an AI and assumptions about the scope of a question are “usually” justified when answering questions posed by humans, except that sometimes we need to delve deeper, when, as in this case, we might expect “trickery”. If the context was a high school physics exam then Alison’s approach would, almost certainly, be optimal for getting a good grade. It seems that we cannot ignore the stakes when deciding how to approach a problem.
The problem is interesting but you can view it in so many ways, many of which are contradictory.
Everyone applied theory of mind to make assumptions about what was or was not implied about the scope of the problem. The obvious lesson here is that we should never try to apply our own theory of (human) mind to an AI mind but this is too harsh on the participants as the problem solver was definitely not an AI and assumptions about the scope of a question are “usually” justified when answering questions posed by humans, except that sometimes we need to delve deeper, when, as in this case, we might expect “trickery”.
If the context was a high school physics exam then Alison’s approach would, almost certainly, be optimal for getting a good grade. It seems that we cannot ignore the stakes when deciding how to approach a problem.