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From: Laws@SRI-AI.ARPA
Newsgroups: net.ai
Subject: Commonsense Reasoning?
Message-ID: <953@sri-arpa.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 15-Jun-84 13:25:05 EDT
Article-I.D.: sri-arpa.953
Posted: Fri Jun 15 13:25:05 1984
Date-Received: Wed, 20-Jun-84 00:42:06 EDT
Lines: 23

From:  Ken Laws 

I'm not sure whether the following probes our commonsense reasoning
ability or simply demonstrates a quirk of natural language:

  "The Monday class will meet on Tuesday next week.  The Wednesday
  class will thus be the day after the Monday class.  (We may
  decide to hold the Friday class on Wednesday and the Wednesday
  class on Friday if everyone can make it then.)"


Another example along the same line is:

  If 3 were half of 5, what would a third of 10 be?

Although it's easy enough to finesse the problem by claiming that
this is nonsense, most people would find the answer 4 to be quite
reasonable.  The answer is derived by following the chain 3:5/2
as 6:5 as 12:10 as 4:10/3, where ":" represents some unspecified
transformation that is assumed to be linear.  I consider this similar
to the nonlinear Monday:Tuesday reasoning above.

                                        -- Ken Laws