SoylentNews

AnonTechie writes:

Science just took us a small step closer to HAL 9000. A new artificial intelligence (AI) program designed by Chinese researchers has beat humans on a verbal IQ test. Scoring well on the verbal section of the intelligence test has traditionally been a tall order for computers, since words have multiple meanings and complex relationships to one another.

But in a new study, the program did better than its human counterparts who took the test. The findings suggest machines could be one small step closer to approaching the level of human intelligence, the researchers wrote in the study, which was posted earlier this month on the online database arXiv, but has not yet been published in a scientific journal. Don't get too excited just yet: IQ isn't the end-all, be-all measure of intelligence, human or otherwise.

For one thing, the test only measures one kind of intelligence (typically, critics point out, at the expense of others, such as creativity or emotional intelligence. Plus, because some test questions can be hacked using some basic tricks, some AI researchers argue that IQ isn't the best way to measure machine intelligence.

[Paper - PDF]: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1505.07909v2.pdf