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
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 30 2015, @10:41PM
Not until it can handle idiom translations.
"bigger than a bread box" -->
"drop a dime" -->
"hang up" -->
"in for a penny, in for a pound" -->
"road apple" -->
(Score: 2) by kurenai.tsubasa on Tuesday June 30 2015, @11:27PM
Easy as pie!
(Score: 2) by kurenai.tsubasa on Tuesday June 30 2015, @11:29PM
Crap, I just wooshed myself!
(Score: 2) by TK on Wednesday July 01 2015, @06:44PM
I don't understand why this hasn't been done yet. (Please enlighten me, oh AI programming overlords.)
If you parse phrases instead of individual words, it shouldn't be impossible to make a database of idioms.
I suppose the next hardest part would be understanding the idiom within the given context. Dropping a dime could be literal or figurative. I don't even want to start thinking about how many ways hang up/hang ups/hung up on could be misunderstood if you don't know if it's meant literally.
Ok, I answered my own question. Nothing to see here.
The fleas have smaller fleas, upon their backs to bite them, and those fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum