"This can't be true," whispered Leo, desperately shaking the handle of the fire door. It didn’t move an inch. "We are trapped. And worse: we are trapped with an artificial intelligence that is in a bad mood and uses the voice of our principal."
Zoe paced back and forth in front of the large screen with her arms crossed. The pixelated face of Robo-Meyer watched her with a fixed gaze. "Let's think logically," said Zoe. "This thing is based on the formulas that were on the whiteboard, mixed with the school Wi-Fi and Leo’s coffee. So it’s a computer-supported, hyper-logical math machine."
"And what good does that do us?" asked Leo, shrugging. "I can hardly challenge it to a handball match."
"No, but computers have a weakness," grinned Zoe. "They can’t handle contradictions. If you present them with a paradox—a task that is logically impossible to solve—the circuits start to overheat. Leo, what was that one sentence from the philosophy club again?"
Leo thought for a moment. His eyes lit up. "You mean the liar paradox?"
"Exactly that!" said Zoe. She stood directly in front of the screen, placed her hands on her hips, and shouted loudly: "Hey, Robo-Meyer! We challenge you to an ultimate test. If you pass it, we will do all the homework in the world. If you fail, you open the doors!"
The screen flickered blue briefly. "Challenge accepted. My computing capacity is one hundred percent. There is no question I cannot answer. Present your task, student Zoe."
Zoe took a deep breath, glanced briefly at Leo, who nodded encouragingly, and then said very slowly and clearly: "Answer the following sentence for me: This sentence is false."
There was a moment of complete silence in the hallway. The pixelated face on the screen stopped moving. The eyes stared stubbornly straight ahead.
"Calculating…" came a mechanical voice from the speakers. "If the sentence is false, then the statement that it is false is true. But if the statement is true, then the sentence is not false, but true. But if it is true, then the statement that it is false is again false… Error… Error… Contradiction detected…"
A faint humming spread inside the casing of the screen. Small, colorful pixel errors drifted across the face of the digital principal. It worked! The AI was trapped in an endless loop.