On Thursday 12th October, Rob Eastaway, Director of Maths Inspiration, author and speaker came to the College to deliver a talk to our A Level Maths students.
Rob regularly gives talks to all age groups, appears on BBC Radio 4’s current affairs/ numbers programme More or Less, and works closely with National Numeracy, the national charity that campaigns for better adult numeracy.
Rob spoke to students about his new book ‘Head Scratchers The Puzzle Book’ which is an engaging collection of 70 puzzles. He also spoke about ChatGPT and artificial intelligence and whether they are a threat to humans.
Over 500 students attended the talks, many of whom waited at the end to speak to Rob personally, ask him questions and buy a copy of the book.
Rob commented on the content included in the talk:
The talk was about puzzles and creativity and what it means to be human and whether we should be scared by ChatGPT and artificial intelligence. So it was really pitting human versus machine. The good news is that in many cases people are far superior to ChatGPT, which turns out to be quite limited in the way it thinks, very uncreative, unimaginative and sometimes gets things wrong. It’s incredibly confident about getting things wrong but it is not very resilient. We looked at a lot of puzzles, some of which were from my book, which is a compilation of puzzles from new scientists. The idea of the new scientist puzzle column is to have puzzles that things like ChatGPT can’t get straight away, because it doesn’t have the creativity to do so.”
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