100% interviews are about communication and demonstrating thought process; after going through some rounds of interviewing candidates myself, any candidate who can adequately explain what they're thinking and how they arrive at their conclusions will be able to demonstrate their skills much more thoroughly than 'just use Postgres'.

That being said, it's also on the ones giving the interviews to push the candidates and ensure that they really are receiving the applicants best. The interviewers don't want to miss potentially great candidates (interviews are hard and nerve-wracking, and engineers aren't known for their social performance), and thus sometimes need to help nudge the candidates in the right direction.

Interesting that here ChatGPT was able to generally get the correct idea! Two points:

The answer is not specifically 'soccer ball', but just ball. I don't think that I would deem that as acceptable, though certainly it's very close! Maybe others would disagree, haha, and as I stated above, I do think riddles are open to interpretation.

Second, as to why my own prompting didn't get- I didn't specify 'identify the object'. I wonder if prompting that it wasn't necessarily a physical thing was helpful enough to get it significantly closer (still funny that the first answer I received was 'escape room').

As to GP: - in sports with balls, there is 'chaos'. I was aiming more from the audience. In some of the larger arenas of professional sports, there's a complete ruckus on certain actions. - The shape is moot; there's many different kinds of 'balls'. Compare football to soccer to tennis. - Balls all have an objective, a goal, usually to get the ball to a specific location ('goal' in the typical sense, but the vagueness could imply general use as well). This was mostly to imply a sense of purpose and use of the riddle's answer.

Again, not saying this is the best riddle ever, just trying to make a point.

I don't think riddles are necessarily 'solvable' in that there's only one right answer; the very fact that they're open to interpretation, but when you get the 'right' answer it (hopefully) makes sense. So if an AI/LLM can answer such a nebulous thing correctly- that's more of the angle I was going at.

Regarding the wizards example, I'm a bit confused; I was thinking that the best way to judge answers for problem solving/creativity was for correctness. I'll think more on whether the 'thought process' counts in and of itself.

The answer to my riddle is 'ball'.

This is an interesting idea, but as you stated, it's all logic; it's hard to come up with an idea where you don't have to explain concepts yet still is dissimilar enough to be in the training.

In your second example with the wizards- did you notice that it failed to follow the rules? Step 3, the witch was summoned by the wizard. I'm curious as to why you didn't comment either way on this.

On a related note, instead of puzzles, what about presenting riddles? I would argue that riddles are creative, pulling bits and pieces of meaning from words to create an answer. If AI can solve riddles not seen before, would that count as creative and not solving problems in their dataset?

Here's one I created and presented (the first incorrect answer I got was Escape Room; I gave it 10 attempts and it didn't get the answer I was thinking of):

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Solve the riddle:

Chaos erupts around

The shape moot

The goal is key

When the top 5% makes 3x more than the bottom 50%? The top 5% makes 38% of the total, while the top 1% alone makes 22%, per the same sources you just quoted. Yes, the ones who make the most can afford to pay the most in taxes.

You didn't even cover GP's main point about getting the top to even pay taxes; the top 1%, per your own source, only pays 26%, while the top 50% pays 16%.

Top x% tax bracket should at least be 32%, per current brackets. So one could argue they aren't even paying what they 'should'. https://www.irs.gov/filing/federal-income-tax-rates-and-brac...