Moving Beyond the Turing Test with the Allen AI Science Challenge

The field of Artificial Intelligence has made great strides forward recently, for example AlphaGo's recent victory against the world champion Lee Sedol in the game of Go, leading to great optimism about the field. But are we really moving towards smarter machines, or are these successes restricted to certain classes of problems, leaving other challenges untouched? In 2016, the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2) ran the Allen AI Science Challenge, a competition to test machines on an ostensibly difficult task, namely answering 8th Grade science questions. Our motivations were to encourage the field to set its sights broader and higher by exploring a problem that appears to require modeling, reasoning, language understanding, and commonsense knowledge, to probe the state of the art on this task, and sow the seeds for possible future breakthroughs. The challenge received a strong response, with 780 teams from all over the world participating.