Is it art? I've always had mixed feelings about the Turing test. This is (a variant on) the mechanism proposed by Alan Turing (you know, the one who looks like Benedict Cumberbatch) to decide if computers could be considered to be intelligent. As I've pointed out previously , the way the test is administered is far too lax. And part of the problem is the requirement of a judge to decide if the entity he or she is communicating with is a person. This is inevitably a subjective decision, and highly dependent on the quality of the dialogue the judge uses. Now, though, we've got a whole new level of silliness, with a Georgia Institute of Technology professor suggesting that in testing for machine intelligence we should also 'ask a machine to create a convincing poem, story or painting.' What remarkable twaddle. Take the 'art' aspect. We can't agree on which humans can create a convincing painting, so how could we possibly use this as a test? By the st...

John Farndon, the author of  Do You Still Think You're Clever?: Even More Oxford and Cambridge Questions!  is, very sensibly, a believer in 'If it ain't broke, don't fix it.' In this follow up to Do You Think You're Clever? he takes exactly the same approach of collecting a series of the more bizarre questions asked in Oxbridge interviews and providing his own suggested answers. As Farndon says, you may not always agree with his answer - but that's part of the fun, because when you're dealing with questions like 'What makes a strong woman?' in a theology interview, it's really up to you how you answer - and what the interviewer is looking for (if he or she is any good) is not so much someone who comes up with a pat answer, but someone who can demonstrate how to think through a question, and this is something that Farndon excels at. Thankfully, the reader doesn't need to know too much about the subject. In fact I found questions lik...

A genius in captivity The whole concept of genius is a very arbitrary one, something that struck me very strongly while reading Genius - a very short introduction for review. Part of the problem seems to be that the same label is applied to (say) the arts and the sciences, yet the criteria are very different. To be a genius in the arts seems based on public acclaim and on the need for that acclaim to last - yet it is ultimately purely subjective. The author of the book clearly thought, for example, that Virginia Woolf was a genius - something I found totally mind-boggling. Genius in art is ultimately a matter of fashion. In science there are very different criteria. If artistic criteria were applied, you would probably label Stephen Hawking a genius, yet most of his colleagues would simply see him as a very good scientist. However, when you find a real scientific genius like Newton, Einstein or Feynman it's very hard for anyone to argue because it's not such a subjectiv...