An Artificial Intelligence has passed the Turing Test of imitating a human.
The chatbot Eugene Goostman convinced one third of the judges in an historic contest at London’s prestigious Royal Society – the home of UK scientific thought since Isaac Netwon discovered gravity – and has passed the Turing Test.
Eugene Goostman is the brainchild of Vladimir Veselov. He was born in Ukraine and has given his Artificial Intelligence program the personality of a young Ukrainian boy.
Chatbot
In a whole day of testing, the judges tried to establish which of two digital conversations conducted in text messaging was the human and which was the AI or chatbot. The judges were mainly academics, including PhD candidates and undergraduates from Reading University’s School of Cybernetics and Robotics. They had to not only guess which interlocutor was human but also rate the machine-made conversation in terms of how realistic it sounded and what kind of human it represented – male or female? Young or old? Native English speaker or not?
The ‘Ukrainian’ chatbot Eugene Goostman convinced 33.3% of the testers that he was human and this represents the critical mass specified by Alan Turing, the father of computer science.
Can machines think?
Turing said that when a machine could engage in conversation so natural that one third of people would be convinced of its humanity, it could really be said to ‘think’. In earlier tests – this is an annual event – the highest score was only 29%. So breaking the 30% marked an historic feat.
Presiding over the testing process, Professor Kevin Warwick the Deputy Vice Chancellor of Coventry University says the result is clear. But he admits it may be controversial – and not just because the other AI and chatbot owners are sore losers.
FI’s editor Peter Warren comments: ” This will be a controversial result because it relies on text messaging. Can that really be said to match Turing’s criterion of a ‘conversation ‘?
Peter Warren presents a special documentary on the life and work of Alan Turing Testing Turing
One of the 2014 Turing Test judges is Luke Hunsberger, professor of computer science at Vassar in New York State. He is sceptical – not bout the winner but about the process. Hunsberger believes that this result passes the letter of the test but perhaps not the spirit…
The Turing Test is also called the Imitation Game and gives its title to a new Hollywood movie starring Benedict Cumberbatch as Turing, a WWII hero who cracked the Nazis’ Enigma Code and is credited with enabling the Allies to win. Watch the trailer here<iframe width=”560″ height=”315″ src=”//www.youtube.com/embed/JZTqwUCxghQ?rel=0″ frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen></iframe>
‘The Imitation Game is released in the UK in December 2014.
