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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
Original Submission
(Score: 2, Insightful) by purpleland on Wednesday July 01 2015, @02:03AM
I skimmed over the article - basically authors built a system that is able to understand five different types of verbal questions (two analogies, classification, synonym, antonym). While building such a system is an interesting achievement from a computer science standpoint, I find that in the overall scheme of judging intelligence it is rather superficial. Not surprising considering how small a part IQ tests play in our lives.
(Score: 2) by GoonDu on Wednesday July 01 2015, @02:22AM
It's like other AI agents, exploit structures within a problem to solve them (arguably like other computer algorithm). The article should be titled, "Amazon Mechanical Turk can now be Automated".