A humanoid robot developed by Kawasaki Heavy Industries is shown off at the World Robot Summit in Tokyo this week. The US military hopes to give such robots “general intelligence”

Machines imbued with artificial intelligence can beat humankind’s finest chess players, spot cancers as effectively as the best radiologists and compose music in the style of Bach.

One thing eludes them, however: common sense.

The US government is making an effort to crack one of the toughest problems in computer science. It is calling on researchers to build machines that can “understand new situations, monitor the reasonableness of their actions, transfer learning to new domains, and communicate more effectively with people.” It wants something that will draw on a multitude of facts and observations to find its own solutions to complex problems.

In other words, it is asking for a computer with the common sense of a ten-year-old child.

The Machine Common Sense Program is