On the 60th anniversary of the death of Alan Turing, the University of Reading held ‘Turing Test 2014’ and this year the test was finally passed.
I guess we’ll see what this means for the future of computers.
Which must’ve been achieved by responding to every other question with, “That’s so gay!”
Fooling 30% of the observers doesn’t seem like a very high threshold.
That being said, it is a milestone.
To fool “more than 30 percent of human interrogators” into thinking they are talking to a 13 year old Ukrainian boy is certainly not to pass Turing’s version of the Turing test, or any of the better defined versions (Turing’s description of his “test” is, in fact, almost laughably vague) that have have been proposed since as meaningful tests of artificial intelligence. If you get to define “the test” your own way, and set the conditions appropriately, it is easy to write a program to pass it. ELIZA was fooling people into thinking they were communicating with a human back in the 1960s. I see no evidence in the article that the same sort of thing is not going on here.
This is kinda fun. A computer was tested at the Royal Society in London to see if it could convince at least 30% of judges it was a 13 year old boy. It convinced 33%. I don’t think this means the computer is really “thinking” but I guess that depends how you define it.
Some of the comments are funny.
Thread already started. 
Does this say more about the abilities of the computer, or the limitations of 13 year old boys?
Yeah–they told the judges that it was either a computer, or a Russian kid who spoke English as a second language, and gave each judge five minutes to chat with the computer, and when one judge thought it really was a Russian kid with bad English, they declared victory. I’m not as impressed as the headline made me think I’d be.
I wonder if anyone has ever run a fakeout Turing Test. Tell everyone it’s a Turing Test, but have no computers, just people.
I wonder how many people would ultimately conclude whoever they were talking to was a computer.
How do you feel about that?
:snicker:
What do you mean how do you feel about that?
You have a case of short term memory loss?
[Blade Runner’s Rachel] Did you ever take that test yourself? [Rachel]
Ukrainian, not Russian, I think. Apparently that’s kind of a big deal.
Arguably, what this really tells us about is the contempt that the middle-aged judges hold teenagers in. Certainly, it’s hard to believe that the transcript herewould have fooled anybody unless they were expecting their subject to be a) bad at English and b) easily distracted:
What do you think?
About what specifically?
That weather god exist or not.
This time I literally asked Cleverbot and that was the response.
I seem to recall a half-joking “Are you a nerd?” test where you got one “nerd” point for each “yes” answer, and two of the questions were like this:
Have you ever taken a Turing Test?
Did you fail?
Yesterday I had an online chat with Snapfish Customer Service and I think it was a computer that failed the Turing test.