--- title: Olympiad: thinking like a machine, Bebras puzzles ★★★ — a lesson of Mova's school · trees and pragmatics description: «Olympiad: thinking like a machine, Bebras puzzles ★★★», a lesson of the ai course of Mova's primary school, sentence by sentence with dependency trees and pragmatics. It begins: Computers do not guess like people do: they follow exact steps, count what they have seen and ask yes-or-no questions, an --- [Mova](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/ai/31-olympiad-thinking-like-a-machine/) [home](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) / [corpora](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/) / [school](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/) / [AI](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/ai/) / Olympiad: thinking like a machine, Beb… # Olympiad: thinking like a machine, Bebras puzzles ★★★ Lesson 31 of the ai course of Mova's primary school: 16 sentences, each with its syntax tree and pragmatics. The lessons are written for Mova, and their agreed trees are part of Mova corpus 0.4 (CC BY-SA 4.0). How Mova does on its tests: [the lesson at school](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/school-run/ai/31-olympiad-thinking-like-a-machine/). - [0](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/ai/31-olympiad-thinking-like-a-machine/0/) — Computers do not guess like people do: they follow exact steps, count what they have seen and ask yes-or-no questions, and Bebras puzzles let you think the same way. - [1](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/ai/31-olympiad-thinking-like-a-machine/1/) — Picture a game of "guess my number" from 1 to 16: the smart first question is "Is it more than 8?", because whatever the answer, half the numbers are gone at once. - [2](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/ai/31-olympiad-thinking-like-a-machine/2/) — A next-word guesser is a counting machine: if after "the" it saw "cat" five times and "dog" twice, it picks "cat", without knowing what a cat is. - [4](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/ai/31-olympiad-thinking-like-a-machine/4/) — Robots and programs do exactly what the steps say, not what you meant, so a step in the wrong order or a fuzzy word like "somewhere nice" is a bug waiting to happen. - [5](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/ai/31-olympiad-thinking-like-a-machine/5/) — In "guess my number" with yes-or-no answers, halving each time is best: 4 questions always find a number from 1 to 16, 5 from 1 to 32, and 7 from 1 to 100. - [6](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/ai/31-olympiad-thinking-like-a-machine/6/) — Three lamps that are each on or off make 2 × 2 × 2 = 8 different signals; four lamps make 16. - [7](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/ai/31-olympiad-thinking-like-a-machine/7/) — A simple next-word guesser counts which words came after a word in its text and picks the one it saw most often. - [8](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/ai/31-olympiad-thinking-like-a-machine/8/) — In a famous test, scientists trained a picture sorter on wolf photos with snow behind them; it learned to look at the snow, not the animal, and called a husky on snow a wolf. - [9](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/ai/31-olympiad-thinking-like-a-machine/9/) — A machine can only learn patterns that are in its examples; if a kind of example is missing, it may get that kind wrong. - [10](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/ai/31-olympiad-thinking-like-a-machine/10/) — A sorting machine that asks yes-or-no questions one after another, each answer choosing the next question, is called a decision tree. - [11](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/ai/31-olympiad-thinking-like-a-machine/11/) — A robot follows its steps exactly; a mistake in the steps is called a bug, and finding and fixing it is called debugging. - [12](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/ai/31-olympiad-thinking-like-a-machine/12/) — In a knockout contest, every match knocks out exactly one player, so 8 players need 7 matches and 16 players need 15 to find one winner. - [13](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/ai/31-olympiad-thinking-like-a-machine/13/) — A spam filter can give points to warning words and flag a message when its points reach a set number. - [14](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/ai/31-olympiad-thinking-like-a-machine/14/) — Bots read text in chunks, not letter by letter, and it was reported that some of them miscounted the r's in "strawberry", which has three. - [15](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/ai/31-olympiad-thinking-like-a-machine/15/) — A number rule such as "double it and add 1" turns 1 into 3, 3 into 7, 7 into 15 and 15 into 31. - [16](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/ai/31-olympiad-thinking-like-a-machine/16/) — Three right turns face the same way as one left turn, and two left turns face you backwards. - ← previous: [Who you are: what you will do with what you learned](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/ai/30-who-you-are-what-you-will-do/) - next →: [Olympiad: claims, clues and tricky messages ★★★](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/ai/32-olympiad-claims-clues-and-tricky-messages/) - ↑ back to [AI](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/ai/)