Imagine you're having friends over for lunch and plan to order a pepperoni pizza. You recall Amy mentioning that Susie had stopped eating meat. You try calling Susie, but when she doesn't pick up, you decide to play it safe and just order a margherita pizza instead. People take for granted the ability to deal with situations like these on a regular basis. In reality, in accomplishing these feats, humans are relying on not one but a powerful set of universal abilities known as common sense. As an artificial intelligence researcher, my work is part of a broad effort to give computers a semblance of common sense.

A poetic Turing test was held at Dartmouth yesterday to pit artificial intelligence against human poets, AP reported. Good news: the computers lost. Judges could easily tell the difference between robot-written sonnets. One of the judges, Harvard English professor and New Yorker contributor Louis Menand, cited syntactical oddities and "uses of language that were just a little off," as reasons why the AI-written sonnets stuck out as so obviously fraudulent. Machines are getting better at natural language.