In a test performed on Saturday, June 7, 2014 at the Royal Society in London, a software called Eugene Goostman passed the Turing test. Chatting with a number of judges, 33% of them have mistaken the program for a human being, specifically a 13 year old Ukrainian boy. Its creators gave him a fictitious past to be able to answer personal questions in a consistent manner.
The Turing test was conceived by Alan Turing, one of the fathers of computer science. The story of this genius is tragic because his efforts to decode the messages of the Nazis during World War II were crucial to the Allied victory but because of the ongoing secrecy and Turing’s homosexuality it took many years for his greatness to be recognized. Over time, due acknowledgments slowly arrived, including monuments such as the statue in Sackville Park in Manchester (photo ©Lmno).
The idea of the Turing test was initially pretty generic, so much that in fact in the past years there were already programs that passed it. For this reason, it’s been perfected and in the version passed by Eugene Goostman questions and topics of conversation weren’t determined before its start.
The program Eugene Goostman was created in 2001 and its creators, the Russians Vladimir Veselov and Sergey Ulasen and the Ukrainian Eugene Demchenko had it participate in various competitions based on the Turing test. Two years ago, in a competition celebrating the 100th anniversary of Alan Turing’s birth, the program convinced 29% of the judges it was a young boy.
Last Saturday’s event remembered the 60th anniversary of the suicide that brought a tragic end to Alan Turing’s life. For the first time, a program passed this version of the Turing test. For this reason, the event managers are satisfied as well but there are still a lot of discussions about the mening of this kind of results.
In particular, what the researchers working in the field of artificial intelligence are asking is whether a program that passes the Turing test is really capable of thinking or just to mimic certain human behaviors. In short, Eugene Goostman’s creators reached a great result but it’s only a step forward in the creation of a real artificial mind.
[ad name=”AmazonComputerAndInternet”]
