A computer chatbot has passed the famous Turing Test for the first time.
A group of judges were convinced that Eugene Goostman was a 13-year-old Ukrainian boy during the 2014 Turing Test competition in London over the weekend. Goostman, however, was merely a computer program created by a team of engineers led by Vladimir Veselov and Eugene Demchenko.
Alan Turing designed the test in 1950 in order to answer the question: Can Machines think?
According to The Verge, a computer has to convince 30% of the judges in order to pass the Turing Test. Eugene Goostman managed to fool one third of the judges to become the first chatbot to pass the artificial intelligence test.
And you know what that means…? Now that computers have the ability to think it’s only a matter of time until they take over the world! Well, maybe not yet.
DO NOT BE ALARMED BY RECENT TURING TEST NEWS, MY FELLOW HUMANS. MACHINES WILL NEVER REPLACE YOU. I MEAN US. LAUGHING OUT LOUD. SMILEY FACE.
— John Martz (@johnmartz) June 8, 2014
Has anybody checked whether the reason the Turing Test has been “beaten” is because the humans got dumber?
— Anil Dash (@anildash) June 9, 2014
FACT. 98% of politicians have failed the Turing test.
— David Schneider (@davidschneider) June 9, 2014
Not everyone is too impressed. i09 writes that some critics are saying that Eugene didn’t actually demonstrate that it could think. Instead, the engineers designed the computer program to mimic the speech patterns of a teenage boy. The computer was able to fool one third of the judges into think it was human but that doesn’t necessarily mean it has the ability to think.
Eugene’s creator Veselov said: “Our main idea was that [Eugene] can claim that he knows anything, but his age also makes it perfectly reasonable that he doesn’t know everything.”
photo credit: Saad Faruque via photopin cc
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