Taking the MIQ to new levels

There’s a famous un-PC rock&roll musician’s gag from the 1980’s . . .

Q. “Which is more intelligent, a drum-machine or a drummer?”
A. “A drum-machine. You only have to punch in the information once.”

Jokes aside, the heated scholarly debate rolls on (and on) about whether a machine can ever be truly ‘intelligent’. Perhaps it might help to resolve matters if there was a reliable method to measure a device’s ‘intelligence’ – say, a washing machine for example? And some researchers believe there is. In the same way that the Intelligence Quotient (IQ) test purports to quantify human intelligence, perhaps the Machine Intelligence Quotient (MIQ) could attempt to measure machine intelligence.

[NOTE: Improbable has not been able to determine the exact origin of the phrase MIQ, but it was certainly in use as early as 1995. See this introduction to ‘Neuro-Fuzzy and Soft Computing’ by professor emeritus Lotfi Zadeh ]

Various research teams have attempted to implement an MIQ test. For example Zeungnam Bien, Yong-Tae Kim and Se-hyun Yang of the Dept. of Electrical Engineering, at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) who presented a paper in: Proceedings of the WAC (World Automation Congress)’98, Albuquerque, NM USA, Vol. 8, May 1998, pp. 275-280 ‘HOW TO MEASURE THE MACHINE INTELLIGENCE QUOTIENT(MIQ) : TWO METHODS AND APPLICATIONS’. [sorry, no link at present] The team not only took forward the development of the MIQ idea, but also, as a proof-of-concept they describe their procedure to measure the MIQ of a washing machine.

“ln this paper, definitions on intelligent machine and machine intelligence are suggested in the viewpoint of both oncologists’ [sic] and phenomenologists’ and, based on these definitions, the novel measurement methods of MIQ are also proposed in both viewpoints.” [They mean ontologists]

Fifteen years on, however, there is still no industry-wide standardised MIQ test. One reason might be lack of a median benchmark.

QUESTION: If an averagely intelligent person is deemed to have an IQ of 100, then what machine could be used as as a standard for MIQ 100? As always, Improbable looks forward to readers’ suggestions.

[The photo shows an LG ‘Truestream’ washing machine – MIQ unknown.(picture courtesy user Puramyun31 at Wikipedia). LG sponsored the KAIST study.]