On the hunt for universal intelligence

A team of Spanish and Australian researchers have taken a first step towards a scientific method to measure the intelligence of a human being, an animal, a machine or an extra-terrestrial. The authors have used interactive exercises in settings with a difficulty level estimated by calculating the so-called "Kolmogorov complexity" (they measure the number of computational resources needed to describe an object or a piece of information). This makes them different from traditional psychometric tests and artificial intelligence tests (such as the Turing test). The most direct application of this study is in the field of artificial intelligence. Until now there has not been any way of checking whether current systems are more intelligent than the ones in use 20 years ago.