Artificial Intelligence Quiz
Turing, Deep Blue, AlphaGo, ChatGPT: 15 questions on how machines learned to think.
Which IBM computer defeated world chess champion Garry Kasparov in a 1997 match?
Got a hunch? Pick the answer that feels right.
Deep Blue
Deep Blue won the six game rematch in May 1997 by 3.5 to 2.5, the first time a computer beat a reigning world champion under standard tournament time controls.
Kasparov had beaten an earlier version of the machine 4 to 2 in 1996, and Deep Blue was retired immediately after its 1997 victory.
Which company developed the chatbot ChatGPT?
Got a hunch? Pick the answer that feels right.
OpenAI
OpenAI launched ChatGPT as a free research preview on 30 November 2022, building it on its GPT-3.5 family of large language models, and it reached an estimated 100 million users within two months.
OpenAI began in 2015 as a nonprofit research lab backed by donors including Elon Musk and Sam Altman before adding a for-profit arm in 2019.
The murderous computer HAL 9000 appears in which 1968 film?
Got a hunch? Pick the answer that feels right.
2001: A Space Odyssey
HAL 9000 controls the spaceship Discovery One in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, and its calm refusal to open the pod bay doors became cinema's defining image of a rogue AI.
HAL is often said to be IBM shifted one letter back, but Arthur C. Clarke insisted the name stood for Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic computer.
Apple's voice assistant Siri debuted on the iPhone 4S in which year?
Got a hunch? Pick the answer that feels right.
2011
Apple unveiled Siri with the iPhone 4S on 4 October 2011, turning a standalone app it had bought in 2010 into a built-in assistant that answered spoken questions.
Siri's underlying technology came out of a DARPA funded research project at SRI International called CALO, the Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes.
The 1956 summer workshop that gave artificial intelligence its name was held at which American college?
Got a hunch? Pick the answer that feels right.
Dartmouth
John McCarthy organised the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence in 1956, and his funding proposal was the first document to use the phrase.
The proposal optimistically suggested that a two month, ten man study could make significant progress on getting machines to use language and improve themselves.
Alan Turing introduced his famous imitation game test in a 1950 paper with which title?
Got a hunch? Pick the answer that feels right.
Computing Machinery and Intelligence
Computing Machinery and Intelligence, published in the journal Mind in 1950, opened with the question Can machines think and proposed judging a machine by whether its conversation could pass as human.
Turing predicted that by the year 2000 a machine would fool an average interrogator 30 percent of the time after five minutes of questioning.
In March 2016 DeepMind's AlphaGo beat which Go champion four games to one?
Got a hunch? Pick the answer that feels right.
Lee Sedol
AlphaGo defeated South Korean 9 dan professional Lee Sedol 4 to 1 in Seoul, a result many experts had expected to be a decade away because Go has far more possible positions than chess.
Lee Sedol's game four victory, built on the so-called divine move at move 78, remains the only time a human has beaten the full AlphaGo in a formal match.
Which IBM system beat champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter on the quiz show Jeopardy! in 2011?
Got a hunch? Pick the answer that feels right.
Watson
Watson won the two game exhibition in February 2011 with $77,147 to Jennings's $24,000 and Rutter's $21,600, parsing natural language clues and buzzing in with a mechanical thumb.
Ken Jennings wrote I for one welcome our new computer overlords beneath his final answer, a line borrowed from The Simpsons.
In the name of models like GPT-4, what do the letters GPT stand for?
Got a hunch? Pick the answer that feels right.
Generative Pre-trained Transformer
GPT stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer: the model generates text, is pre-trained on huge amounts of it before fine tuning, and uses the Transformer neural network architecture introduced by Google in 2017.
The first GPT paper from OpenAI in 2018 described a model with 117 million parameters, a tiny fraction of the size of today's frontier models.
Which MIT scientist created ELIZA, the 1960s chatbot that mimicked a psychotherapist?
Got a hunch? Pick the answer that feels right.
Joseph Weizenbaum
Joseph Weizenbaum wrote ELIZA between 1964 and 1966, and its DOCTOR script reflected users' statements back as questions in the manner of a Rogerian therapist.
Weizenbaum was disturbed by how readily people confided in the program and became one of the earliest and sharpest critics of overtrusting computers.
What term is commonly used when an AI chatbot confidently states something that is false or invented?
Got a hunch? Pick the answer that feels right.
Hallucination
A hallucination is a fluent but fabricated output, such as a citation or statistic that does not exist, and it happens because language models predict plausible text rather than check facts.
Cambridge Dictionary named hallucinate its Word of the Year for 2023, citing this new AI meaning.
The 2017 Google paper that introduced the Transformer architecture behind modern chatbots had which title?
Got a hunch? Pick the answer that feels right.
Attention Is All You Need
Attention Is All You Need, written by eight Google researchers, replaced recurrent networks with a self attention mechanism and became one of the most cited papers in computer science.
All eight authors have since left Google, and several founded AI start-ups including Cohere, Character.AI and Adept.
Geoffrey Hinton shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics for neural network research with which scientist?
Got a hunch? Pick the answer that feels right.
John Hopfield
John Hopfield of Princeton and Geoffrey Hinton of Toronto won the 2024 physics prize for foundational discoveries that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks, including the Hopfield network and the Boltzmann machine.
Hinton had resigned from Google in 2023 so he could speak freely about the risks of the technology he helped create.
Demis Hassabis and John Jumper shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for AlphaFold, an AI that predicts what?
Got a hunch? Pick the answer that feels right.
Protein structures
AlphaFold2 predicts the three dimensional shape of a protein from its amino acid sequence, solving a problem that had frustrated biologists for about 50 years.
The other half of that prize went to David Baker for computational protein design, and DeepMind released predicted structures for over 200 million proteins.
Which 2012 neural network, built by Alex Krizhevsky, Ilya Sutskever and Geoffrey Hinton, won the ImageNet competition and kicked off the deep learning boom?
Got a hunch? Pick the answer that feels right.
AlexNet
AlexNet won the 2012 ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge with a top-5 error rate of 15.3 percent, more than 10 percentage points better than the runner-up.
The network was trained on two consumer Nvidia GTX 580 gaming graphics cards in Krizhevsky's bedroom, which is why GPUs became the engine of modern AI.
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All Technology quizzes →About the Artificial Intelligence Quiz
In 1997 a refrigerator sized IBM machine beat the world chess champion, in 2016 a Google program outplayed a Go legend, and in 2022 a chatbot called ChatGPT reached a hundred million users faster than any app before it. Artificial intelligence has a surprisingly long history, from a 1950 paper by Alan Turing to a 1956 summer workshop that gave the field its name.
These 15 questions cover the landmark machines, the pioneers, the key vocabulary and the Nobel Prizes that finally recognised neural network research. It suits anyone who uses AI tools daily and wants to know where they came from, with a few deeper cuts for people who have read the papers.
You will find 15 multiple choice questions here, each with four options. Difficulty: Medium. Most people finish in about 6 minutes, and every answer comes with a short explanation and one extra fact worth keeping.
How to play
Read the question and pick one of the four answers. The correct answer is revealed straight away with a short explanation, then press Next question to keep going. At the end you get your score out of 15 and a full review of your round. Play again any time and the questions arrive in a fresh order. There is no timer and no account.
Good to know before you play
Who is considered the father of artificial intelligence?
John McCarthy coined the term for the 1956 Dartmouth workshop and later created the Lisp language, though Alan Turing's 1950 paper is usually treated as the field's starting point.
What was the first computer to beat a world chess champion?
IBM's Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov in a six game match in May 1997, the first time a computer defeated a reigning world champion under tournament conditions.
When was ChatGPT released?
OpenAI released ChatGPT as a free research preview on 30 November 2022, and it passed an estimated 100 million users within about two months.
Answer key: all 15 questions with explanations
- Which IBM computer defeated world chess champion Garry Kasparov in a 1997 match?
Deep Blue Deep Blue won the six game rematch in May 1997 by 3.5 to 2.5, the first time a computer beat a reigning world champion under standard tournament time controls. Kasparov had beaten an earlier version of the machine 4 to 2 in 1996, and Deep Blue was retired immediately after its 1997 victory. - Which company developed the chatbot ChatGPT?
OpenAI OpenAI launched ChatGPT as a free research preview on 30 November 2022, building it on its GPT-3.5 family of large language models, and it reached an estimated 100 million users within two months. OpenAI began in 2015 as a nonprofit research lab backed by donors including Elon Musk and Sam Altman before adding a for-profit arm in 2019. - The murderous computer HAL 9000 appears in which 1968 film?
2001: A Space Odyssey HAL 9000 controls the spaceship Discovery One in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, and its calm refusal to open the pod bay doors became cinema's defining image of a rogue AI. HAL is often said to be IBM shifted one letter back, but Arthur C. Clarke insisted the name stood for Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic computer. - Apple's voice assistant Siri debuted on the iPhone 4S in which year?
2011 Apple unveiled Siri with the iPhone 4S on 4 October 2011, turning a standalone app it had bought in 2010 into a built-in assistant that answered spoken questions. Siri's underlying technology came out of a DARPA funded research project at SRI International called CALO, the Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes. - The 1956 summer workshop that gave artificial intelligence its name was held at which American college?
Dartmouth John McCarthy organised the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence in 1956, and his funding proposal was the first document to use the phrase. The proposal optimistically suggested that a two month, ten man study could make significant progress on getting machines to use language and improve themselves. - Alan Turing introduced his famous imitation game test in a 1950 paper with which title?
Computing Machinery and Intelligence Computing Machinery and Intelligence, published in the journal Mind in 1950, opened with the question Can machines think and proposed judging a machine by whether its conversation could pass as human. Turing predicted that by the year 2000 a machine would fool an average interrogator 30 percent of the time after five minutes of questioning. - In March 2016 DeepMind's AlphaGo beat which Go champion four games to one?
Lee Sedol AlphaGo defeated South Korean 9 dan professional Lee Sedol 4 to 1 in Seoul, a result many experts had expected to be a decade away because Go has far more possible positions than chess. Lee Sedol's game four victory, built on the so-called divine move at move 78, remains the only time a human has beaten the full AlphaGo in a formal match. - Which IBM system beat champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter on the quiz show Jeopardy! in 2011?
Watson Watson won the two game exhibition in February 2011 with $77,147 to Jennings's $24,000 and Rutter's $21,600, parsing natural language clues and buzzing in with a mechanical thumb. Ken Jennings wrote I for one welcome our new computer overlords beneath his final answer, a line borrowed from The Simpsons. - In the name of models like GPT-4, what do the letters GPT stand for?
Generative Pre-trained Transformer GPT stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer: the model generates text, is pre-trained on huge amounts of it before fine tuning, and uses the Transformer neural network architecture introduced by Google in 2017. The first GPT paper from OpenAI in 2018 described a model with 117 million parameters, a tiny fraction of the size of today's frontier models. - Which MIT scientist created ELIZA, the 1960s chatbot that mimicked a psychotherapist?
Joseph Weizenbaum Joseph Weizenbaum wrote ELIZA between 1964 and 1966, and its DOCTOR script reflected users' statements back as questions in the manner of a Rogerian therapist. Weizenbaum was disturbed by how readily people confided in the program and became one of the earliest and sharpest critics of overtrusting computers. - What term is commonly used when an AI chatbot confidently states something that is false or invented?
Hallucination A hallucination is a fluent but fabricated output, such as a citation or statistic that does not exist, and it happens because language models predict plausible text rather than check facts. Cambridge Dictionary named hallucinate its Word of the Year for 2023, citing this new AI meaning. - The 2017 Google paper that introduced the Transformer architecture behind modern chatbots had which title?
Attention Is All You Need Attention Is All You Need, written by eight Google researchers, replaced recurrent networks with a self attention mechanism and became one of the most cited papers in computer science. All eight authors have since left Google, and several founded AI start-ups including Cohere, Character.AI and Adept. - Geoffrey Hinton shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics for neural network research with which scientist?
John Hopfield John Hopfield of Princeton and Geoffrey Hinton of Toronto won the 2024 physics prize for foundational discoveries that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks, including the Hopfield network and the Boltzmann machine. Hinton had resigned from Google in 2023 so he could speak freely about the risks of the technology he helped create. - Demis Hassabis and John Jumper shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for AlphaFold, an AI that predicts what?
Protein structures AlphaFold2 predicts the three dimensional shape of a protein from its amino acid sequence, solving a problem that had frustrated biologists for about 50 years. The other half of that prize went to David Baker for computational protein design, and DeepMind released predicted structures for over 200 million proteins. - Which 2012 neural network, built by Alex Krizhevsky, Ilya Sutskever and Geoffrey Hinton, won the ImageNet competition and kicked off the deep learning boom?
AlexNet AlexNet won the 2012 ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge with a top-5 error rate of 15.3 percent, more than 10 percentage points better than the runner-up. The network was trained on two consumer Nvidia GTX 580 gaming graphics cards in Krizhevsky's bedroom, which is why GPUs became the engine of modern AI.
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