Intelligent Machines: AI had IQ of four-year-old child

An artificial intelligence system (AI) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has taken an IQ test designed for a young child.

The results, written up by MIT Review, revealed that its IQ was equivalent to that of a four-year-old.

Increasingly machines are getting better at specific tasks such as playing chess, recognising pictures and making complex commutations.

But general intelligence is still proving elusive for most of them.

The MIT machine - dubbed ConceptNet4 - was put through its paces by researchers from the University of Illinois, led by Stellan Ohlsson.

The IQ test they chose, known as the Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence, is commonly used in US schools.

It is designed for young children and measures intelligence in five categories:

• information - questions such as "Where can you find a penguin?"

• vocabulary - questions such as "What is a house?"

• word reasoning - children are given three clues such as "You can see through it", "It is square", "You can open it".

• similarities - questions such as "Pen and pencil are both....?"

• comprehension - questions such as "Why do people shake hands?"

The questions had to be modified for the computer and some programming was necessary to allow the machine to understand what it was being asked.

It did well on vocabulary and similarities, had an average score on information and scored poorly in the word reasoning and comprehension categories.

"The ConceptNet scored a [mark] that is average for a four-year-old child, but below average for five to seven-year-olds," the researchers concluded.

A lot depended on how the machine interpreted the questions. For instance, in answer to the question 'Why do we shake hands?", the machine produced the result "epileptic fit".