In the ever-expanding contest between artificial intelligence and the ordinary human mind, you can chalk up another one for the computer.
Scientists have developed a computer system with sophisticated pattern recognition abilities that performed much better than humans in differentiating between people experiencing genuine pain and people who were just faking it.
In a study recently published in the journal Current Biology, human subjects did no better than chance — about 50 percent — in correctly judging if a person was feigning pain after seeing videos in which some people were and some were not.