Has Cleverbot Passed the Turing Test?

kruhft writes "It seems that Cleverbot, the chatbot so ready to admit that it was a unicorn during a discussion with itself, has passed the Turing test. This past Sunday, the 1334 votes from a Turing test held at the Techniche festival in Guwahati, India were released. They revealed that Cleverbot was voted to be human 59.3% of the time. Real humans did only slightly better and were assumed to be humans 63.3% of the time." As the Wikipedia link above points out, though, there's no single, simple "Turing Test," per se — many systems have successfully convinced humans over the years. Perhaps Cleverbot would consent to taking part in a Slashdot interview, to be extra-convincing.

Comments

Definitely not

[ModernGeek]

Clever bot is a piece of garbage that hasn't even surpassed Perl scripts on IRC in the 1980s. It isn't even worth mentioning, it's nothing more than a piece of crap with a "Web 2.0" edge to it that doesn't even have long term memory while having a "conversation". Far from AI, far behind what's already been out there.

Re:Definitely not

[Jarik C-Bol]

is a Turing test valid if the human is an idiot?

Re:Definitely not

[ipwndk]

Sure. But the Turing test is a piece of garbage too. I have a deep respect for Allan Turing, and all that he has done for science. But the Turing test was death to AI the moment he proposed it. It MUST be forgotten and burried, and maybe incidents like these can help us achieve that!

Re:Definitely not

[vlm]

Sure. But the Turing test is a piece of garbage too. I have a deep respect for Allan Turing, and all that he has done for science. But the Turing test was death to AI the moment he proposed it. It MUST be forgotten and burried, and maybe incidents like these can help us achieve that!

Eh, its more of a thought experiment. Its like making fun of Heisenberg because you want experimental proof of quantum dot technology LEDs, not dead/undead cats in a box with a source and a geiger counter. Einstein had some legendarily weird thought experiments too.

Its value is in making you think of contrived, yet vaguely familiar situations in a really strange problem space. Not much value in an experiment design engineering planning review meeting.

As part of a previous job I occasionally got involved as an engineering contact in telco service monitoring situations. You know, like every time we call long distance I hear echo, that type of thing. Trust me, most human to human conversations are pretty F-ing unintelligent, so I think an Artificial Intelligence would not be challenged in outperforming them. PHBs talk meaningless buzzwords to each other, not just to peons, for example.

Re:Definitely not

[Savantissimo]

"is a Turing test valid if the human is an idiot?"

What about the humans in the control group who failed the test? Maybe some of them were flunked by idiots making the judgement, but likely many of them really were indistinguishable from bots. Given that this test was done at a tech convention in India, I personally suspect that most of the 36.7% of humans who flunked the test work in call centers. I've certainly had a few on the line that were indistinguishable from a chatbot running on a Speak & Spell, and were certainly quite as useless as a very useless thing indeed.

Re:Definitely not

[Anonymous Coward]

You can definitively make out a chatbot with this simple conversational thread:

- I'm going to tell you a color. I want you to remember it, okay?
- Green.
- Now, what's the color that I just told you?

Since cleverbot just parrots back responses from its DB, the responses make no sense:

Me: I'm going to tell you a color. I want you to remember it, okay?
CB: What do you want me to remember?
Me: Green.
CB: Why do you like the colour green?
Me: Now, what's the color that I just told you?
CB: It is purple.

Even better, ask it to then make an association based on something you told it earlier.

I have no idea how this thing managed to get more than 50% of people. Trying to "communicate" with it for more than a minute just ends in frustration and annoyance.

Re:Definitely not

[Arlet]

No, the Turing test is fine. It is just stupid of people to try to pass the Turing test with the current understanding of AI. The bots can do nothing but fail hopelessly (assuming decent interviewers like Turing had in mind).

Compare with the following: a civilization passes the "space test" when they've successfully landed people on the moon. In itself, that's a perfectly fine test. Now, imagine people in the Stone Age trying to pass the test by trying to build taller and taller wooden ladders. That's about what people are trying to do with the Turing test right now.

Indeed, forget about the Turing test right now, and work on AI from different angles. When we are finally ready, the Turing test can be resurrected.

WTF?

[TheRaven64]

So, I went and had a little chat with 'clever' bot to see how clever it was. I thought I'd start off with something a typical five-year-old could answer:

User: Hello.
Cleverbot: Hello!
User: Can you help me with a maths problem?
Cleverbot: Sure, what is it?
User: If I have 5 ostriches, and two run away, how many are left?
Cleverbot: 9.
User: Seriously?
Cleverbot: What is the formula for the area of circle?
User: What does that have to do with anything?
Cleverbot: When I talk to people I don't know, I tend to ask for their name. It's only polite.
User: I think you managed to fail the Turing test in two questions if I'm generous, may be one.
Cleverbot: My name is Cleverbot?
User: I could write a clevererbot in about 20 lines of prolog. What kind of idiots thought you were human?
Cleverbot: Only one. I don't think I could fit 1,000 people in my living room.

I think the fact that 59% of people thought it was human says a lot more about the intelligence of the average human than it says about the bot...

Re:WTF?

[rgmoore]

The Turing test, as originally proposed, wasn't just a test of casual conversation. It was supposed to involve skeptical questioners doing their very best to separate human from AI, with no limit on conversational topic. The hypothetical questions in Turing's original paper included ones about math, chess problems, and poetry. If you held a Turing test under the original rules, with a reward for testers who successfully told human from AI (and for humans who successfully proved their humanity) you would find that no AI would get anywhere close to success. Because everybody knows that, public tests like this one have repeatedly watered down the original concept to make things more interesting. But that just proves how far AI has to come, not that it's getting close to succeeding.