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From MIT Technology Review: The Best AI Program Still Flunks an Eighth-Grade Science Test

The winner, a contestant based in Israel called Chaim Linhart, combined several established machine-learning techniques with large databases of scientific information to correctly answer 59 percent of the questions. Like other participants, Linhart fed his computer system hundreds of thousands of questions paired with correct answers so that it could learn to come up with the right answer.

A score of almost 60 percent might disappoint most parents, but it is remarkable for a computer. The test used for the contest was, however, simplified slightly to make it practical for computers to attempt. Diagrams were removed, for example, and only questions with multiple-choice answers were used.

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An impressive recent example is a Google program designed to play the subtle and computationally complex board game Go (see “Google’s AI Masters the Game of Go a Decade Earlier Than Expected”).

This progress has inspired hopes, and fears, that truly intelligent machines may not be so far away. But Etzioni believes new techniques will be needed to achieve even basic competency at more complex tasks, something that the latest results seem to confirm. Likewise, the best means of gauging progress in artificial intelligence, the Turing Test, has proved all too easy to rig using simple tricks.