Turing Test Passed

schwit1 (797399) writes "Eugene Goostman, a computer program pretending to be a young Ukrainian boy, successfully duped enough humans to pass the iconic test. The Turing Test which requires that computers are indistinguishable from humans — is considered a landmark in the development of artificial intelligence, but academics have warned that the technology could be used for cybercrime. Computing pioneer Alan Turing said that a computer could be understood to be thinking if it passed the test, which requires that a computer dupes 30 per cent of human interrogators in five-minute text conversations."

Not literally a test

[Livius]

Should we tell them that the Turing test was a thought experiment and never meant as an actual objective test that would prove anything?

Re:Turing Test Failed

[meerling]

Last I heard, there were heavy restrictions on what types of questions could be asked.
Second, from what I've seen, they are little more than cleverly created scripts, and as such, despite them fooling a few people, are in no way indicative of machine intelligence.

Re:Outdated test

[jovius]

The test itself is flawed in the way that it's specific purpose is to test an AI, so the expected/unexpected outcome is set from the beginning. The AI's should be in the wild and not revealed until enough data of the interaction would have been gathered.

AI's can usually be tricked by injecting surreal elements to the conversation or asking about current events, or recent things. The focus should be in the intelligence and not in the conversational or mimicking part - the current online AI's could well be classified as chatbots. The feds even use chatbots to catch pedophiles, so wouldn't they pass the Turing Test?

Re:Voight-Kampff test?

[Anonymous Coward]

*Whoosh*
First, the period of ellipses indicates that he didn't finish the question. I believe this is a commonly accepted punctuation in English.

Secondly, this is a reference to a book by Phllip K. Dick called "Do Androids Dream Electronic Sheep," later made into a movie with Harrison Ford called Blade Runner. The questions are posed to androids (biological robots otherwise resembling humans) to gauge their emotional response to questions. This is the only way to distinguish them from people.

Re:Unbounded tape

[tepples]

Turing machine memory access takes linear time. To read a cell N cells away from the head takes N cycles.

Re:An autist chat simulator duped 100% of people.

[Anonymous Coward]

... babbled on like an autist or otherwise mentally retarded youth would.

Autist is not a word, and autism is not a form of mental retardation.

Re:Thirty percent?

[bsolar]

Is that 30% success rate actually meant to be the threshold to pass the test? From the article on Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] it simply looks like a prediction about how AIs in the future will fare:

Turing predicted that machines would eventually be able to pass the test; in fact, he estimated that by the year 2000, machines with 10 GB of storage would be able to fool 30% of human judges in a five-minute test, and that people would no longer consider the phrase "thinking machine" contradictory.

Re:A pretty low requirement

[mark-t]

Watson did not search the Internet for answers while playing. This was something that they specifically mentioned during the program which featured it, during one of their documentary breaks from the main game. During its learning phase, it was of course quite connected, but while playing the actually game, Watson was designed to exclusively rely on the static database of knowledge that it had at the start of the game. No Internet search facilities were employed.