AI in daily life (recommendations, assistants) in Intro to Computing - Practice Problems & Coding Challenges

Challenge - 5 Problems

🧠 Conceptual

intermediate

How does a recommendation system decide what to suggest?

Imagine you use a music app that suggests songs you might like. Which of the following best explains how the app decides what to recommend?

A It looks at songs you listened to before and suggests similar ones based on patterns from many users.

B It asks your friends to send you song recommendations manually.

C It only suggests songs that are the most popular worldwide, ignoring your preferences.

D It randomly picks songs from all available music without considering your past choices.

💡 Hint

Think about how apps learn from your behavior and others' to make suggestions.

Recommendation systems analyze your past choices and compare them with patterns from many users to suggest songs you might like. This is called collaborative filtering.

❓ trace

intermediate

Trace the assistant's response flow

Consider a voice assistant that processes your request in steps: 1) Listen to your voice, 2) Convert speech to text, 3) Understand the request, 4) Find the answer, 5) Speak the answer back.

Which step comes immediately after converting speech to text?

A Understand the request

B Speak the answer back

C Find the answer

D Listen to your voice

💡 Hint

Think about what the assistant needs to do to know what you asked.

After converting speech to text, the assistant must understand the request before finding an answer.

❓ Comparison

advanced

Comparing AI assistants and traditional software

Which of the following statements best describes a key difference between AI assistants and traditional software?

A Both AI assistants and traditional software always produce the same output for the same input.

B Traditional software can understand natural language, but AI assistants cannot.

C AI assistants can learn from interactions and improve, while traditional software follows fixed instructions without learning.

D AI assistants require manual updates for every new task, unlike traditional software which adapts automatically.

💡 Hint

Consider how AI assistants handle new situations compared to fixed programs.

AI assistants use learning algorithms to improve from experience, while traditional software executes fixed code without adapting.

❓ identification

advanced

Identify the AI feature in a smart recommendation example

A streaming service suggests movies based on your watch history and ratings. Which AI feature is primarily used here?

A Speech recognition

B Collaborative filtering

C Image recognition

D Robotic process automation

💡 Hint

Think about how the system uses your and others' preferences to suggest movies.

Collaborative filtering analyzes user preferences to recommend items similar users liked.

🚀 Application

expert

Predicting the output of a simple AI decision process

Consider a simplified AI assistant that decides what to do based on your command:

command = "play music"
if "play" in command:
    action = "start music player"
elif "call" in command:
    action = "dial contact"
else:
    action = "ask for clarification"
print(action)

What will be printed if the command is "play music"?

A "dial contact"

B "ask for clarification"

C SyntaxError

D "start music player"

💡 Hint

Check which condition matches the command string first.

The command contains "play", so the first condition is true and the assistant will print "start music player".