Kapor bet that no robot would pass the test before 2029, and the rules call for the challenger and three human foils to have two-hour conversations with each of three judges. The hardest Turing test described so far is one set up as part of a $20,000 bet between the futurologist Ray Kurzweil and the Lotus founder, Mitch Kapor. The machine only wins if it fools at least half the judges into thinking it's the human (though every year there is a 'bronze medal' awarded to the machine that convinces the most judges). Those rules call for the computer and a human to have a 25-minute conversation with each of four separate judges. It remains impressive that Eugene had 33% of the judges 'he' spoke to convinced of his humanity, but the robots still have a long way to go to pass the gold standard of modern Turing tests, using rules laid out in 1990 by the inventor Hugh Loebner.

Those somewhat arbitrary, if historically faithful, rules were the ones followed by the University of Reading. Alan Turing's 1950 paper laid out the general idea of the test, and also laid out some specifics which he thought would be passed 'in about 50 years' time': each judge has just five minutes to talk to each machine, and the machines passed if more than 30% of the judges thought that they were human. Or a Turing test?īut it might be better to say that the chatbot, a Russian-designed programme called Eugene, passed a Turing test.

On Sunday, for the first time in history, a machine succeeded in that goal. Most of those interlocutors will be humans one will be a chatbot, created for the sole purpose of tricking the judge into thinking that it is the real human. On one side of a computer screen sits a human judge, whose job is to chat to some mysterious interlocutors on the other side. The test, as Turing designed it, is carried out as a sort of imitation game. Coined by computing pioneer Alan Turing in 1950, the Turing test was designed to be a rudimentary way of determining whether or not a computer counts as 'intelligent'.

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