Turing test beaten by Russian chatterbot

Sunday, June 8, 2014

Yesterday, the Russian chatterbot "Eugene Goostman" by a team of Russian and Ukrainian developers became the first machine to pass a Turing test, under the academic event organizers' interpretation of the test as originally described by British mathematician Alan Turing. The competition was held at the Royal Society in London, England, and was organized by Kevin Warwick and Huma Shah of the University of Reading to mark the 60th anniversary of Turing's death on June 7, 1954.

The Turing test is a test of artificial intelligence aiming to fulfil the suggestion of Alan Turing in his 1950 paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence", which stated that within fifty years, an "average interrogator" would, following a five-minute long conversation, "not have more than 70 per cent chance" of correctly predicting whether they are speaking to a human, or a machine — which would be able to, as such, fool at least 30% of human judges into thinking it is human.

In the contest, where Eugene Goostman and four other bots competed, the bot successfully tricked 33% of the participating judges, which included television actor Robert Llewellyn of the BBC television series Red Dwarf, and John Sharkey, Baron Sharkey, a sponsor of Turing's 2013 posthumous pardon. To give the bot a "believable personality", Goostman is portrayed as being a thirteen year-old boy of the Ukraine; the bot's head developer Vladimir Veselov stated that this made Goostman "not too old to know everything and not too young to know nothing".

The bot had previously come close to beating the Turing test on several occasions; it has been a three-time runner-up for the Loebner Prize, and it won a Turing contest at Bletchley Park in 2012, held to mark the 100th anniversary of Turing's birth. In the 2012 Bletchley Park competition Goostman was, notably, only one percent away from the target of 30%.

Speaking about the achievement, Warwick stated: "Some will claim that the Test has already been passed. The words Turing Test have been applied to similar competitions around the world. However this event involved the most simultaneous comparison tests than ever before, was independently verified and, crucially, the conversations were unrestricted. A true Turing Test does not set the questions or topics prior to the conversations. We are therefore proud to declare that Alan Turing's Test was passed for the first time on Saturday."

Veselov felt that the achievement was "remarkable", and suggested that it could help increase interest in artificial intelligence and chatterbot technology.

Have an opinion on this story? Share it!

Related news

"Alan Turing given posthumous pardon" — Wikinews, December 25, 2013

Sources

Jack Schofield. "Computer chatbot 'Eugene Goostman' passes the Turing test" — ZDNet, June 8, 2014
Dante D'Orazio. "Computer passes Turing Test for first time by convincing judges it is a 13 year old boy" — The Verge, June 8, 2014
"Turing Test success marks milestone in computing history" — University of Reading, June 8, 2014
Celeste Biever. "Bot with boyish personality wins biggest Turing test" — The New Scientist, June 25, 2012
Alan Turing (1950). "Computing machinery and intelligence". Mind 59 (236): 433-460. http://loebner.net/Prizef/TuringArticle.html.

Share this:

This page is archived, and is no longer publicly editable.

Articles presented on Wikinews reflect the specific time at which they were written and published, and do not attempt to encompass events or knowledge which occur or become known after their publication.

Got a correction? Add the template {{editprotected}} to the talk page along with your corrections, and it will be brought to the attention of the administrators.

Please note that due to our archival policy, we will not alter or update the content of articles that are archived, but will only accept requests to make grammatical and formatting corrections.

Note that some listed sources or external links may no longer be available online due to age.

The text of this article is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License