AI Quiz – Printable Version
20 multiple-choice questions with an explained answer key, ready to print.
Print the sheet (or save it as a PDF from the print window), hand it out, then mark it together using the answer page: every answer is explained. Perfect for a party, a birthday, a classroom, a care home or a team activity.
Name: ………………………………Score: ……… / 20
- Which IBM AI program defeated world chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997?
- A. Stockfish
- B. AlphaZero
- C. Watson
- D. Deep Blue
- Which type of machine learning involves training a model on data that is already labeled with the correct answer?
- A. Federated learning
- B. Reinforcement learning
- C. Unsupervised learning
- D. Supervised learning
- What is the term for when a generative AI produces false or invented information while presenting it as an established fact?
- A. A data leak
- B. A hallucination
- C. Overfitting
- D. An algorithmic bias
- What is the term for the technique of carefully crafting an instruction to get the best possible response from a generative AI model?
- A. Web scraping
- B. Prompt engineering
- C. Data mining
- D. Fine-tuning
- Which British computer scientist, often nicknamed the 'Godfather of AI', received the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on neural networks?
- A. Andrew Ng
- B. Geoffrey Hinton
- C. Yoshua Bengio
- D. Yann LeCun
- What are the periods called (notably the 1970s and the late 1980s) when enthusiasm and funding for AI collapsed because results failed to live up to promises?
- A. AI winters
- B. AI nights
- C. Binary crashes
- D. Digital ice ages
- What was the secret of the 'Mechanical Turk', a chess-playing automaton unveiled in 1770 that beat many opponents, including Napoleon according to legend?
- A. It used magnets to move the pieces
- B. It always repeated the same memorised game
- C. It cheated by moving the opponent's pieces
- D. A human player was hidden inside
- Which French researcher, a pioneer of the convolutional neural networks used to read bank cheques automatically, received the 2018 Turing Award with Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio?
- A. Cédric Villani
- B. Jean-Gabriel Ganascia
- C. Yann LeCun
- D. Luc Julia
- Which thought experiment by philosopher John Searle (1980) imagines a person answering perfectly in Chinese using a rulebook, without understanding a single word, to show that manipulating symbols is not understanding?
- A. The brain in a vat
- B. The ship of Theseus
- C. The Chinese room
- D. Plato's cave
- Which country granted citizenship to Sophia, a humanoid robot, in 2017, a heavily publicised world first?
- A. Saudi Arabia
- B. Japan
- C. South Korea
- D. The United States
- Which Honda humanoid robot, able to walk, run and climb stairs, was unveiled in 2000?
- A. ASIMO
- B. R2-D2
- C. Atlas
- D. Pepper
- In 2023, which Hollywood profession led a long strike, notably to regulate the use of AI in their work?
- A. Screenwriters
- B. Stunt performers
- C. Make-up artists
- D. Projectionists
- In which Spike Jonze film (2013) does a man fall in love with an artificial intelligence called Samantha?
- A. Ex Machina
- B. Her
- C. A.I. Artificial Intelligence
- D. The Matrix
- Which French AI start-up, founded in 2023, launched the assistant 'Le Chat'?
- A. Hugging Face
- B. DeepL
- C. Anthropic
- D. Mistral AI
- In the second game of Go against Lee Sedol in 2016, which AlphaGo move amazed experts with its originality?
- A. Move 78
- B. Move 1
- C. Move 37
- D. Move 100
- Which Nobel Prize did John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton receive in 2024 for their foundational work on artificial neural networks?
- A. Medicine
- B. Economics
- C. Physics
- D. Chemistry
- Which DeepMind program taught itself in 2017, with no human game examples, to play chess, go and shogi at a superhuman level?
- A. Deep Blue
- B. AlphaZero
- C. Stockfish
- D. Watson
- What does it mean for an AI to be "multimodal"?
- A. It runs on several computers
- B. It can handle several types of data: text, images, sound, video…
- C. It speaks several languages
- D. It has several power-saving modes
- In which year did Alan Turing propose his famous test of whether a machine can 'think'?
- A. 1936
- B. 1950
- C. 1969
- D. 1997
- In 2016, at which game did the AlphaGo program beat champion Lee Sedol?
- A. Chess
- B. Go
- C. Poker
- D. Shogi
Answer key — AI Quiz
- D. Deep BlueDeep Blue, developed by IBM, defeated world champion Garry Kasparov in a 1997 match, a landmark event in AI history.
- D. Supervised learningSupervised learning uses already-annotated training data, allowing the model to learn to predict the correct output from known examples.
- B. A hallucinationA 'hallucination' refers to a generative AI model confidently producing incorrect or invented information that is not grounded in its training data.
- B. Prompt engineeringPrompt engineering involves designing and refining the instructions given to a generative AI model to obtain the best possible responses.
- B. Geoffrey HintonGeoffrey Hinton, nicknamed the 'Godfather of AI', received the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics for his foundational work on neural network learning.
- A. AI wintersAfter over-ambitious promises, researchers went through two 'AI winters': funding cut, projects abandoned.
- D. A human player was hidden insideFor more than 80 years, a chess master hidden inside the cabinet operated the machine.
- C. Yann LeCunIn the 1990s, Yann LeCun's system was already reading a large share of the cheques written in the United States.
- C. The Chinese roomSeen from outside, the person seems to speak Chinese; inside, they apply rules without understanding anything.
- A. Saudi ArabiaThe announcement, widely seen as a publicity stunt, caused debate: the robot was getting rights some women in the country did not yet have.
- A. ASIMOIt was a star of tech shows for nearly twenty years before retiring in 2022.
- A. ScreenwritersAfter nearly five months, they secured that AI could not be credited as an author or used to cut their pay.
- B. HerJoaquin Phoenix talks with an AI we only hear as a voice (Scarlett Johansson).
- D. Mistral AIFounded in Paris by former Google DeepMind and Meta researchers, it is named after the wind of southern France.
- C. Move 37A move a human would almost never have played, which proved decisive.
- C. PhysicsThe committee rewarded methods inspired by statistical physics that underpin modern machine learning.
- B. AlphaZeroBy playing millions of games against itself, AlphaZero beat the best specialised programs after only a few hours of training.
- B. It can handle several types of data: text, images, sound, video…A multimodal AI can, for example, describe a photo, answer a spoken question or read a chart.
- B. 1950In the paper 'Computing Machinery and Intelligence' (1950), Turing proposed an 'imitation game': if a human cannot tell the machine from a person in a written conversation, the machine passes the test.
- B. GoAlphaGo, by DeepMind (Google), won 4 games out of 5. Go was considered far harder than chess for a machine: it has more possible positions than there are atoms in the observable universe.