http://www.cs.uic.edu/Main/Faculty-Area

(I've met Professor Sloan directly once) told me about the article submitted here. He has a conference paper coming out for the AAAI conference next week,

http://www.aaai.org/Conferences/AAAI/aaai13.php

with more details about the research. It looks, from the first few comments submitted here, like many Hacker News readers think either

a) that the article wasn't sufficiently respectful of the field of artificial intelligence,

or

b) that the field of artificial intelligence deserves no respect.

But my understanding of Professor Sloan is that he takes artificial intelligence, his main current topic of computer science research, very seriously, and he is well aware of the societal importance of artificial intelligence research. Maybe the message was lost in the ComputerWorld reporter's treatment, but perhaps the conference paper will set the record straight.

On my part, I was glad our mutual friend told me about this article, as only today I completed an extensive edit of the Wikipedia article about IQ classification,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IQ_classification

so I've been pickling myself in scholarly writings on IQ testing recently. My friend is aware of that, and I think shared this link because of the angle of giving an IQ test designed for a human child (the WPPSI is strictly a preschool-age test) to an artificial intelligence system. Of course, we expect artificial intelligence systems to do different things from what preschool children do, so it's not surprising that an "expert" artificial intelligence system might not score high on a human IQ test. I'll read the professional publications when they come out to find out more.

Are any of you going to the AAAI meeting?