I use radio broadcasts (tune to any talk show station randomly in sleep mode) to put me to sleep. Usually I am asleep within 5 minutes and don’t remember anything the next morning. However, the other night I happen to tune in to a broadcast in which a quiz show host ask the audience 3 questions “How well do you know about the country you live in called the United State? (you are not allowed to use your computer/smart phone and must rely on your own brain) (i) Besides the State of Maryland, can you name another state with name ending in “land”? (ii) How many States have name begin with the alphabet “A” in the US? (iii) Can you name a state with name ending in the alphabet “g”? (The host added that you must be a genius to be able to answer this question correctly) The answers to these 3 questions which the host insists are known to every adult intrigued me and I proceeded to try to figure them out while lying in bed without using any mechanical/electronic help. Now if you have a list of the names of the states. It is a simple matter to find the answer using the list. But this is done in a show and the audience has no chance to go to a library or use a smart phone to check things out. You must rely on your memory. Thus, like everyone I first try to reconstruct a list of the state alphabetically (since the questions themselves deal with “alphabets”. I quickly decided this is an impossible task and would take way too long). Next I remembered a good (but may not be perfect) list in my memory which even every school child would know (This is a big hint for solving the puzzle). Before I went through 35% of this list, I know already I have the three correct answers. The whole puzzle was solved in less than five minutes before I drifted into sound sleep. Can you figure out how and what? BTW, the third answer is not any harder than the first two once you have a list. No genius is involved. Google for an alphabetical list of the states and the answers are easily looked up. Note human solved this puzzle by a. First convert the puzzle to another question which may be simpler for a human to solve b. Next I found different ways to solve the equivalent question – some may be simpler/easier for a human being to solve/recall (Note: a picture is worth a thousand words) c. Finally solve this simpler equivalent problem. d. Steps “a” and “b” currently are not easily handled by the capabilities of the current LLM of AI. Not all of us can be replaced by AI. We are not obsolete just yet. Next day I also googled for answer to question (iii) which is a single fact based question. Google instantly answered the question correctly. But I had some difficulties of posing the question (ii) and could not pose a question for google to answer questions (i) despite several tries. Apparently google still was not able to understand a question requiring first search for a partial answer, store the partial answer and then search for another fact to match the partial answer first found (it is a two part question not a simple one fact finding question. Correct me if my impression is wrong).

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