“Teenager” supercomputer fools a Turing Test Panel

June 12, 2014

IDG News Service – A supercomputer has achieved an artificial intelligence milestone by passing the Turing Test, according to the University of Reading in the U.K.

At an event on Saturday at the Royal Society in London, a conversation program running on a computer called Eugene Goostman was able to convince more than a third of the judges that it was human.

The result is a first for the Turing Test, proposed in 1950 by Alan Turing, regarded as the father of artificial intelligence (AI).

Experts still view this result as just one step in the evolution of intelligent machines.

The Turing Test is an experiment that focuses on whether people can tell whether they are communicating with a person or a machine. If the machine is able to fool people into thinking it’s human during a series of text conversations, it’s considered to have passed the test.

The program, dubbed Eugene, was developed by Vladimir Veselov and Eugene Demchenko and competed against four other supercomputers at the Royal Society event. Eugene is designed to simulate the responses of a 13-year-old boy.

Eugene convinced 33 percent of the human judges that it was human, and the results were independently verified, the university said.

“Our main idea was that he can claim that he knows anything, but his age also makes it perfectly reasonable that he doesn’t know everything,” Veselov said in a statement.

Warwick described the Turing test as an iconic and controversial milestone in artificial intelligence. “Now we move on to the full Turing test — creating a robot and we cannot tell the difference between the robot and a human,” he wrote in an email.