A supercomputer program dubbed ‘Eugene Goostman’ has passed the iconic Turing Test by fooling human judges into thinking they were talking to a 13-year-old boy from Odessa, Ukraine.
Standard interpretation of the Turing Test: player C, the interrogator, is tasked with trying to determine which player – A or B – is a computer and which is a human. Image credit: Hugo Férée / CC BY-SA 3.0.
The Turing Test is based on 20th century mathematician and code-breaker Alan Turing‘s 1950 famous question and answer game, ‘Can machines think?’
The experiment investigates whether people can detect if they are talking to machines or humans.
If a computer is mistaken for a human more than 30 per cent of the time during a series of 5-min keyboard conversations it passes the test.
No computer program has ever achieved this, until now.
Eugene Goostman is a supercomputer program that simulates a 13-year-old boy. It was one of five programs that participated in the Turing Test 2014, an event held on 7th June 2014 at the Royal Society in London, UK.
Eugene was developed in Saint Petersburg, Russia. The development team includes Ukrainian born Eugene Demchenko who now lives in Russia and Vladimir Veselov, who was born in Russia and now lives in the United States.
The program managed to convince 33 per cent of 30 human judges that it was human. Among the judges tasked with separating the human and computer participants was the actor Robert Llewellyn, who played robot Kryten in the sci-fi comedy TV series Red Dwarf.
“Eugene was born in 2001. 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. We spent a lot of time developing a character with a believable personality,” Mr Veselov explained.
“This year we improved the dialog controller which makes the conversation far more human-like when compared to programs that just answer questions. Going forward we plan to make Eugene smarter and continue working on improving what we refer to as conversation logic.”
Prof Kevin Warwick of the University of Reading added: “in the field of Artificial Intelligence there is no more iconic and controversial milestone than the Turing Test, when a computer convinces a sufficient number of interrogators into believing that it is not a machine but rather is a human.”
“It is fitting that such an important landmark has been reached at the Royal Society in London, the home of British Science and the scene of many great advances in human understanding over the centuries. This milestone will go down in history as one of the most exciting.”
“Some will claim that the Test has already been passed. The words Turing Test have been applied to similar competitions around the world,” Prof Warwick said.
“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.”
