Kevin Okell: Smarter than we look

If you watch ‘Have I Got News For You' or were keeping an eye on the news in April, you may recall a story about a robot that can build an IKEA chair in 20 minutes. Impressive as that sounds, the punchline was that a human could do it in 10 minutes. A follow-up story in The Economist examined the limits of artificial intelligence (AI) more broadly. The fact that physical dexterity is computationally more demanding than mental tasks has been known for some time - it even has a name: Moravec's paradox. The phenomenon explains why robots can beat the world's best chess and go players but...