They're certainly meant to be entertaining. I really don't think they're meant purely as jokes, though. And which are the trick questions with trivial answers? I can't recall seeing any of those.

Any question that is poorly specified can generally be augmented with reasonable assumptions or approximations, so that an AI could potentially give an answer. W|A is a natural language interface after all, and seeing all the "W|A can" posts on the account shows that it can certainly answer questions that don't have a precise mathematical definition. The intent behind each question is usually clear to me, and to have an AI that is useful to humans, we expect the AI to infer this intent and make reasonable assumptions.

Even "focal length of the Eye of Sauron" could conceivably be given a rough answer from estimates of the eye's geometry (either from descriptions in the books, or a visual comparison with other objects of approximately-known size in the movie).

The interesting part of the account IMO is thinking through how a hypothetical AI might answer each question. Take the latest question, "derivative of the shore length of Tasmania with respect to ocean depth". This is poorly specified in that "Tasmania" only exists for ocean depths that are low enough to not completely cover it and high enough to not have another land mass connect to it, and I'm sure there's tons of other assumptions that humans would implicitly make in answering a question like that. But the topography of the Earth is approximately known, and I can see how a rough answer could be calculated. Thinking through these assumptions, and comparing current technology with what we'd expect from an AGI, is quite illuminating, and is what makes that Twitter account so awesome IMO.

Focal length of Eye of Sauron? Since when is that an optical eye? Isn't it a magical eye or some kind of partially-omniscient remote viewing, combined with awareness of what all his aligned entities are seeing? Even if it were a purely optical eye, and even if he always had line of sight to what he wanted to see, the question has fatal problems. If you assumed an infinite-resolution retina and perfect lens, and if you could exclude field of view over some arbitrary angle like 1° based on the fact that he might not be able to focus on more than one town at a time, what in the text could possibly be used to narrow down whether he has a field of view of 10m or 100m or 1km in any particular case? While we're speculating on an absurd hypothetical eye optics question, how do we even know it's not a compound eye with multiple different focal channels? Stackexchange even comes to the rescue with a quote from Fellowship stating that the eye was a pit opening on nothing (i.e. clearly not an optical eye, as "nothing" excludes a retina), and a comment further stating that the eye had no physical form and was only perceivable to a few people[1].

In that coastline question, what's the definition of shore length (isn't that a single a scalar) in terms of ocean depth (wouldn't ocean depth be zero at the shore)? If there's not a given mathematical relationship, the derivative with respect to ocean depth is zero, right? The question is confusing. I get the sense you're reading something else into the question, but it's not clear what. There's no clear definition of the variables shore length or ocean depth, there's no function relating those variables, and if there were a function I don't see why it would be likely to be differentiable.

I'll grant that some of the questions seem half serious and answerable... but mostly only if you have the obscure data necessary to answer them. Does anyone know the statistical distribution of blue whale length, or the armspan of Jesus (is that pre or post crucifixion armspan)? Does anyone know the font and font size used and ink weight and average characters per page and number of pages used by the Times in their print edition? That NYT question could be determined, but would take a fair amount of investigation to get those necessary estimates.

Questions like those are difficult for Wolfram Alpha not because it's too dumb, but because it doesn't have data needed to answer them. Not many humans, if any, have the data or knowledge to answer them either. If the questions were after ballpark figures, then the questions should be littered words like "average" and "typical", but they're not. You have questions about specific species, specific people.

Then, when it really matters, those specifics vanish: When asking the total time needed for everyone (everyone!) to adjust watches during DST changes, assuming everyone has a watch, there's no mention of watch type, or what to do about the few cripples who wouldn't be able to set the watch without assistance; would the total time be infinite then since for a few people the task can never be completed, and the question specifically said everyone, rather than asking about a typical case?

Those are just a few of the most recent questions. Given how quickly those can be torn apart, why is my original assertion even worth debating? That twitter account is, generally speaking, tweeting silly or poorly specified questions that even reasonably intelligent humans couldn't provide definitive answers for.

[1] https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/27657/was-the-eye-...

I'll give you the Eye of Sauron example. I admit I haven't read the books, and I've seen the films once or maybe twice.

For the other examples you mention:

As ximeng mentioned, "ocean depth" here should refer to sea level. "Sea level" would probably have been a better wording.

Christ the Redeemer is a statue in Rio de Janeiro[1]. W|A can give answers for "length of blue whale", "number of blue whales", and "height of Christ the Redeemer" (but not arm span, which Wikipedia gives as 92 ft.). It's not much of a stretch to combine those to get an estimate of the answer.

The contents of every NYT issue should be available on the internet, and some of the other figures can be found on the internet without too much trouble: the font is 8.7pt Imperial[2], and there are on average 150k words per issue[3]. Of course, these are fairly obscure pieces of data, but W|A prides itself on pulling together lots of disparate data sources. And if you don't consider having a particular obscure piece of data to be intelligence, you could easily shift the question to be, "how might an AI pull this information from the internet using natural language processing?"

For the time zone example, I took it to mean time zone changes from traveling, not just from DST (hence "per day"), and the total duration refers to the amount the watch is changed, not how long it takes to change it. Though whether the question means "sum of absolute values of differences" or just "sum of differences" is unclear.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christ_the_Redeemer_(statue) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_York_Times#Print_newsp... [3] https://www.quora.com/How-many-words-are-in-an-average-print...

If sea levels rise by one meter, how much does the coastline shrink by?