Supercomputer passes Turing Test for the first time

At an event organised by the University of Reading on Saturday, the chatbot convinced the panel of judges 33% of the time that he was human. The 65-year-old Turing Test investigates whether people can detect if they are talking to machines or humans. It is considered the gold standard for gauging how far we've come in the field of artificial intelligence. In the test, an interrogator communicates with two contestants, one human and the other a machine. The interrogator asks questions of each for five minutes and then decides which one is human. If the machine wins more the 30% of the rounds, it is regarded as having passed the test. Until now, no computer programme has ever achieved this. Professor Kevin Warwick, a visiting professor at the University of Reading, said: "This milestone will go down as one of the most exciting in history. 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." One of five supercomputer programmes participating in the event, Eugene Goostman was developed in 2001 by Russian-born Vladimir Veselov. He commented: "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. "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'."