Sorry everyone.
Many media outlets are reporting that a computer programme pretending to be a 13-year-old boy from the Ukraine passed the Turing test for artificial intelligence on Saturday.
At an event held at the Royal Society in London, the programme, called Eugene Goostman, duped 33% of judges into thinking it was a real person rather than a machine during five-minute-long text-based conversations.
Four other machines also took part in the test, along with a total of 30 judges. The judges included Lord Sharkey, who led the call for Turing’s posthumous pardon for his 1952 conviction for homosexuality; Robert Llewellyn, who played humanoid robot Kryten in Red Dwarf; and Aaron Sloman, a professor of computer science at the University of Birmingham.
The test was proposed by computer science pioneer and World War II codebreaker Alan Turing as a more concrete way to understand whether machines can "think". Essentially, it tests a computer program's ability to exhibit intelligence indistinguishable from (or better than) that of a human.
Of course the Turing Test hasn't been passed. I think its a great shame it has been reported that way, because it reduces the worth of serious AI research. We are still a very long way from achieving human-level AI, and it trivialises Turing's thought experiment (which is fraught with problems anyway) to suggest otherwise.
The 30% pass mark did not come from Turing himself.
It's widely quoted that a machine must fool the interrogator only 30% of the time in order to pass, but Turing himself never set a pass rate. He just said that the test would be passed if "the interrogator decide[s] wrongly as often when the game is played [between a computer and a human] as he does when the game is played between a man and a woman."
REX USA / Rex
