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posted by janrinok on Tuesday June 30 2015, @07:41PM   Printer-friendly

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


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 30 2015, @10:15PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 30 2015, @10:15PM (#203535)

    And AA meetings are talking about alcohol related problems. Is it so surprising or offensive that a group made around a specific subject talks about that specific subject? As has been said before MENSA is a support group for highly intelligent people. Go to a meeting some time and see the truth of it for yourself.

  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Anal Pumpernickel on Tuesday June 30 2015, @10:24PM

    by Anal Pumpernickel (776) on Tuesday June 30 2015, @10:24PM (#203541)

    As has been said before MENSA is a support group for highly intelligent people.

    It's a support group for people who think they are highly intelligent. There is a difference. Maybe some of them are indeed highly intelligent, but mere IQ scores don't show that.

    • (Score: 2) by ikanreed on Tuesday June 30 2015, @10:54PM

      by ikanreed (3164) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday June 30 2015, @10:54PM (#203548) Journal

      The relationships between g(general intelligence) and IQ are complex and insufficiently defined scientifically.

      But most people in the field believe there's a strong relationship there and that IQ is describing something important to g. More specifically, it's describing crystallized intelligence in pattern recognition.

      Among other reasons, increasing g-loadings of IQ tests only has a small effect on individual results.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 01 2015, @06:32AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 01 2015, @06:32AM (#203644)

      This is becoming a religious belief in some people that scoring high on a test that measures pattern recognition and puzzle solving makes one very unlikely to have any brainpower. It smacks of bitterness and "doth protest too much."

      • (Score: 2) by Anal Pumpernickel on Wednesday July 01 2015, @07:52AM

        by Anal Pumpernickel (776) on Wednesday July 01 2015, @07:52AM (#203659)

        This is becoming a religious belief in some people that scoring high on a test that measures pattern recognition and puzzle solving makes one very unlikely to have any brainpower. It smacks of bitterness and "doth protest too much."

        What? If you're saying I said that, it's just a straw man; I'd say that there isn't proof that IQ tests measure intelligence, so someone's IQ doesn't mean anything to me. And that last sentence is just an irrelevancy, as well as a non sequitur. Criticizing something doesn't mean you're somehow 'bitter', and even if you were, that would not invalidate your arguments.

        What truly seems to be a religious--and sadly, popular--belief is the notion that IQ tests measure intelligence. As soon as we can actually define "intelligence" in any truly objective way, and then come up with an objective way to measure it based on said definition, then I would accept that, but IQ is not it. To use similar logic to your own, it smacks of people wanting to feel better than they are without actually doing anything of note.