Say what you will about whether artificial intelligence will one day be as smart as a human. It has already become a star math student. Last summer, AI built by Google and OpenAI correctly answered five of six complex questions at the International Math Olympiad, an annual competition for the world’s top high school students.

AI’s common sense, however, may still be a bit lacking. A few months later, Anuradha Weeraman, a software engineer in Sri Lanka, noticed that leading AI systems struggled to answer what was essentially a trick question that most people would find laughably simple. When he told various chatbots that he needed to take his car to a repair shop that was only 50 meters away and asked if he should walk or drive, the bots told him to walk.