OK - so I'm always willing to try something new, so I took sykesix up on the offer to try perplexity.

Installation was simple (though the sign-on mechanism had me using Google for credentials. While I also could have used X or Facebook, it goes against my paranoia to share anyone's credentials with anyone else, but "la vie" they say.

It pulled in my bookmarks from Chrome and the user interface was as expected (the same as if I owned a Ford and then sat in a Chevy to drive it for the first time).

So, how the heck do you test an AI? (Damned if I know).

I'm putting together a trip next year which (among other things) includes about a month in Japan and I had already asked both ChatGPT and Copilot (Microsoft AI) for a two-day walking tour oof Kanazawa, Japan, so I put the task to Perplexity. It was fast and created a more interesting version, complete with photos of each site (though I didn't ask for that). I then asked for a two-day walking tour to another location (Busan, Korea) and it did well, but curiously the output had a very different look/feel. To be honest, I haven't back-checked any of the tours to see if they were simply plagiarized from an existing one on the web (while life is short, it might be a worthwhile experiment). I do know that when I asked ChatGPT to "rewrite" a travel essay of mine (a number of times, with slightly different preference instructions - to see if it could remove redundancy, run-on sentences and such), it insisted on inserting additional anecdotes about what I supposedly did and then insisted on repeating them from version to version.

I then asked it to solve a simple math problem which had tied both ChatGPT and Copilot in knots. They kept trying to convince me that 2+2=5 and similar stupidity while presenting what they thought were correct answers (recently, when I tried ChatGPT version 5 on Poe, it took about a minute after I complained to solve it by brute force. Perplexity took a couple of seconds to write small bit of python code and presented the correct solution immediately.

BTW, see how long it takes you to solve the following (which requires only the math skills you learned in junior high school):

Take the numbers 2, 4, 6 and 8. Use each one time. You can add, subtract, multiply and divide (no factorials, exponentials or fancy stuff). Create an equation which equals 25

So "Thank You" sykesix

Jeff

PS: When you get tired of trying to figure this out, ask either Perplexity or me for the answer :-)