[bgwalter]

"Database" was not meant in a literal sense. Clearly a lot of knowledge from similar problems is encoded in the model, that is why you can use models as a kind of fuzzy encyclopedia.

It is like an open book exam for humans where they also can lookup similar problems.

The current top comment makes the same point, but in a more diplomatic and sophisticated manner.

[chpatrick]

I mean strong human contestants would also know a lot of similar problems, I'm not seeing how it's fundamentally different or not a meaningful achievement.

[JohnKemeny]

Do you also think that IBM Watson won Jeopardy primarily because of its ability to reason?

Or due to its massive internal database combined with superhuman button pressing skills?

[chpatrick]

As far as I know Watson was actually smoke and mirrors, relying on a ton of human hand written rules and didn't do any reasoning at all. It was a giant program written in PROLOG, not machine learning.