A computer program capable of passing I.Q. tests

The Imitation Game (Alan M. Turing, 1950), now commonly known as the Turing Test (see, e.g., Oppy and Dowe, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/turing-test, 2003), was proposed as a way in which thinking or intelligence could be ascribed to any agent including a computer program or machine able to play the game. People routinely ascribe intelligence to humans and other animals by a variety of means, including those discussed by Turing. But when humans wish to specifically quantify intelligence, this is most commonly done by means of an intelligence quotient (I.Q.) or other aptitude test. Many such aptitude test questions fit in to Turing's (1950) framework of being able to be typewritten to a teleprinter communicating between two rooms or, using modern technology still well within the spirit of Turing's game, being able to be typed as text into a World Wide Web (WWW) page applet. Sequences of such questions such as an entire I.Q. test of them may well form a strict subset of Turing imitation games, since they typically are independent of one another and do not take any advantage (or even account) of the contextual (conversational) framework of Turing's game. We present here a fairly elementary WWW-based computer program (shown in large part at http://wwwpersonal.monash.edu.au/~psan5) which, on a variety of I.Q. tests, regularly obtains a score close to the purported average human score of 100. One conclusion that some might make is to ascribe intelligence to the program. Another conclusion to make is that the reason that I.Q. test success can be automated with comparative ease is that administering an I.Q. test requires little intelligence it requires comparatively little more than giving a list of questions with known answers. Turing's imitation game test requires greater intelligence to pass largely because of the flexibility it permits to an intelligent questioner such as in the use of language and in taking into account the responses to previous questions before continuing the line of questioning. We also briefly consider administration of the imitation game “test” via “detection programs” as a test in its own right (Dowe and Hajek, 1998; CalTech Turing Tournament, http://turing.ssel.caltech.edu, 2003). All other things being equal, a more intelligent administrator can administer a more challenging test and this notion can be continued recursively (Dowe and Hajek, 1998).