Traditional measures of human intelligence would often be inappropriate for systems that have senses, environments, and cognitive capacities very different from our own.

So Shane Legg and Marcus Hutter at the Swiss Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Manno-Lugano, have drafted an idea for an alternative test which will allow the intelligence of vision systems, robots, natural-language processing programs or trading agents to be compared and contrasted despite their broad and disparate functions.

It would measure the AI’s ability to carry out complex tasks within its particular environment and then comparing the complexity of its environment with those of a wide range of other AI systems.