Single Comment

There are objective ways of evaluating an individual's performance, but
there is always going to be the problem of motivating the individual to
perform.  (Lack of motivation is not the same thing as lack of
intelligence; if the subject simply doesn't like the examiner, that
could
spell loads of problems for testing his intelligence.)  I remember once,
way back around 1974 or so, a psychologist was working on his doctoral
dissertation (or whatever it was), and he wished to test people on how
well they could capture all the squares on a chessboard with a single
Knight starting out at a corner.  He loaded up the whole chessboard with
pawns, and put a Knight in a corner.  He even offered each subject (under
18???) five dollars 'to see if they could capture every pawn on the
board.'  Yes, we all know there are tons of ways you can 'Tour the
Chessboard' with a Knight, but he was also timing his subjects to see
how
fast they could do it.  I think I was something like 16 years old at the
time, and five dollars simply didn't motivate me that much.  (Boy was
that psychologist mad when I went around the back of the Skittles Room -
that's a room set aside for playing chess in between rounds - showing
all
the kids a way to do it, before he could get to them, and test them...) 
The moral to the lesson, is that money does not always motivate people to
do things, or perform 'logically' on a test.  I wasn't interested in
the five dollars so much as sharing a secret that was supposed to be
worth
money, and which was bound to annoy those who thought the money was
really
the end-all, be-all of motivation.

Now, if you test two people on two different chessboards, timing them
both
on how fast they could tour the chessboard with a knight, that might have
been more interesting.