Why AI Can Still Hardly Pass An Eighth Grade Science Test
by The Daily Eye Team February 20 2016, 2:43 pm Estimated Reading Time: 0 mins, 47 secsAn artificial intelligence competition that asked AI models to answer eighth-grade science questionsannounced its winners this week—but it doesn’t look like robots will be graduating junior high any time soon.
The Allen AI Science Challenge, set up by the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, asked participants to build AI models that could answer multiple-choice questions akin to those found on eighth grade science exams. The winning AI scored a rather lukewarm 59.3 percent—not exactly an A grade.
The task was posed as an alternative to the conventional Turing Test, which is often criticised for being an exercise in duping gullible humans rather than proving any real “intelligence.” The point of using an exam-style test was to challenge computer models’ language processing and reasoning skills, as they need to be able to first understand the question and then find and apply the correct answer.