You might be under the impression that, since we have been a little quiet on here lately, there has not been much happening on our side. You couldn’t be more wrong :). We have in fact been diligently working on new lesson plans and activities. We have also already tested the first one from the new set at the Jože Moškrič Primary School in Ljubljana, which we visited just yesterday (21 December) – on the first day of winter, when days finally stop getting shorter.

The fifth grade students tried their hand at sorting (classifying) pictures of typical, older Slovenian houses. The task wasn’t easy by any means: out of 47 houses, only the Panonian ones were easily recognisable, while many Karstian houses could quite easily have been mistaken for those from the Gorenjska region (Alpine) or for a regular Slovene house. Still, the students did excellently – some groups only got three houses wrong, some even only one.

We then looked at how the same task would be performed by the computer. Unless the computer is presented with examples of individual house types, but is simply given the task to divide the houses into four groups, the result will be a Pannonian group, an Alpine group, and two groups that are a mix of everything. However, if we train it by showing it typical examples from each group, the computer becomes quite successful in classifying any new houses we present it with. But even so, the students did better, as the computer still got four houses wrong!

While the computer’s ability to differentiate between traditional Slovene house types is impressive, we were even more positively surprised by the discussion that followed: with the fifth grade students, we discussed real philosophical questions of artificial intelligence. When the computer (correctly) classifies a house as Alpine, can we really say that it knows that the house is Alpine? Can a computer really even know anything? Wouldn’t it be possible, by the same logic, to say that the English-Slovene dictionary knows how to say a cat in Slovenian? Of course not, dictionaries don’t know anything, they just contain information. How are computers any different? Just like dictionaries, they too, simply contain data, either saved in their memory (where they have perhaps computed it themselves from other data), or obtained from the internet. So, can the computer know anything at all in the same way people do? Can it think? Can it even be intelligent or is artificial intelligence just an illusion?

It’s amazing, the things one can already discuss with fifth graders!

Let us also thank the teacher Sandra Kete that kindly hosted us. We’re definitely coming back to the Jože Moškrič Primary School.