In 1956, John McCarthy coined the term Artificial Intelligence (AI) to describe the type of machine-based intelligence that he thought would be reality within ten years. Warp-drive to 2012 and AI still seems a very long way off, especially if you use the well-known Turing Test to assess intelligence.

But perhaps the Turing Test, which attempts to capture the nuances of human speech by asking humans to guess whether something is a machine or another human being, is the wrong test, especially when you stop to consider that computers are already flying planes, driving cars and buying and selling shares on global financial markets.

One possible alternative to the Turing Test is a visual test created by researchers at the University of Exeter (above). Click here for more…