They have beaten us at chess, Go and co-written a Europop album. Now computers are taking a step into a very human territory: the reading comprehension test, scourge of schoolchildren everywhere.

Alibaba on Monday said its artificial research outperformed mere mortals in a global reading comprehension test that seeks answers to such pressing questions as “what was Nikola Tesla’s ethnicity?” and “how big is the Amazon rainforest?”

Luo Si, chief scientist of natural language processing at Alibaba’s research arm, the Institute of Data Science of Technologies, dubbed the machines’ victory “a milestone”. He said the technology has many uses, from customer service to museum tutorials to medical enquires — some of which are already being handled by chatbots globally.