I recently watched “The Machine”, an enjoyable sci-fi flick about a secret defence project to construct an artificially intelligent android who will be the ultimate super-soldier. Naturally, they design their robot killer in the form of a shapely young woman who spends much of the movie in a state of undress. What surprised me was that, in the opening scenes, they manage to totally mess up the well-known Sally-Anne “doll” test for theory of mind.

In the words of Wikipedia, the “the key question [is] the Belief Question: ‘Where will Sally look for her marble?'”. In the movie, the scientist asks “Where should Sally look for her ball?” which makes a nonsense of the whole thing! I am surprised that no one picked up on this in the course of making the movie. Come on people, it’s not rocket science.