Who are you calling bird-brained?
An attempt is being made to devise a universal intelligence test
WHAT is the IQ of a chimpanzee? Or a worm? Or a game-show-winning computer program? Or even an alien from the planet Zaarg who can learn any human language in a day, can beat chess grandmasters ten at a time and can instantly factor the products of large prime numbers? At the moment it is impossible to say. IQ tests depend on language, and even Watson, a computer program that beat two human contestants in a special edition of “Jeopardy!” (an American quiz show) on February 16th, does not have a perfect command of English. In any case there is, at the moment, no meaningful scale on which non-human intelligence can be compared with the human sort.
This article appeared in the Science & technology section of the print edition under the headline "Who are you calling bird-brained?"
From the March 5th 2011 edition
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