India, May 23 -- Swarat Chaudhuri was obsessed with puzzles as a child, he says.

Growing up in Kolkata, he spent the afternoons solving every number pyramid and word jumble he could find in local publications. He then graduated to Bengali translations of the American mathematician Martin Gardner's popular-science books on math, logic and puzzles.

Chaudhuri dreamed of a world in which he could solve puzzles for a living.

That is, more or less, what he now does, as a researcher and professor of computer science at the University of Texas, Austin.

One of the puzzles he's working on is particularly crucial. It is the question of whether artificial intelligence can actually expand the scale of human knowledge.

Here's how Chaudhuri, 46, is...