Turing Test Passed

schwit1 (797399) writes "Eugene Goostman, a computer program pretending to be a young Ukrainian boy, successfully duped enough humans to pass the iconic test. The Turing Test which requires that computers are indistinguishable from humans — is considered a landmark in the development of artificial intelligence, but academics have warned that the technology could be used for cybercrime. Computing pioneer Alan Turing said that a computer could be understood to be thinking if it passed the test, which requires that a computer dupes 30 per cent of human interrogators in five-minute text conversations."

Comments

Not literally a test

[Livius]

Should we tell them that the Turing test was a thought experiment and never meant as an actual objective test that would prove anything?

Re:Unbounded tape

[tepples]

Turing machine memory access takes linear time. To read a cell N cells away from the head takes N cycles.

Re:Thirty percent?

[bsolar]

Is that 30% success rate actually meant to be the threshold to pass the test? From the article on Wikipedia it simply looks like a prediction about how AIs in the future will fare:

Turing predicted that machines would eventually be able to pass the test; in fact, he estimated that by the year 2000, machines with 10 GB of storage would be able to fool 30% of human judges in a five-minute test, and that people would no longer consider the phrase "thinking machine" contradictory.

Re:A pretty low requirement

[mark-t]

Watson did not search the Internet for answers while playing. This was something that they specifically mentioned during the program which featured it, during one of their documentary breaks from the main game. During its learning phase, it was of course quite connected, but while playing the actually game, Watson was designed to exclusively rely on the static database of knowledge that it had at the start of the game. No Internet search facilities were employed.