Alan Turing's Prediction for the Year 2000

Chernicky writes "In 1950, Alan Turing , the father of computer science and (arguably) artificial intelligence, made a prediction about the year 2000. Turing said that in about fifty years, the answers of a computer would be indistinguishable from those of human beings, when asked questions by a human interrogator. With the year 2000 upon us, Dartmouth College is offering a $100,000 prize to the first programmer that can pass the Turing Test. The deadline for submissions is October 30, 1999. "

Comments

I hope I can pass...

[zuvembi]

Dartmouth College is offering a $100,000 prize
to the first programmer that can pass the Turing Test.

Ummm, I sure hope I can pass the Turing test. I know some of you out there might have problems passing it, but I'm pretty confident I can pass.

Of course if he meant 'first program' it might make more sense.

The Turing Test is no longer a goal of AI

[Nagash]

The Turing Test has long been discounted as a bad goal of AI research, although people have been doing Turing Test "auditions" for years.

The problem with the Turing Test is that it tries to make a computer human and that's not really what AI is all about - it's more about trying to solve problems using various techniques in order to make programs useful. (Maybe making a computer human is not all that useful ;) )

The problem is that the program only needs to pass 5 minutes worth of conversation. That's a pretty narrow goal. Technically, it's not really artificial intelligence at this point - it's just a ruse (however, it's still extremely diffucult to program natural language capabilities and have "common sense" -- two goals that are themselves not bad ones to do research in).

Douglas R. Hofstadter wrote an interesting article about this - he had a conversation with a program named Nicolai (I think). It was quite amusing - the program spits out some very interesting answers. :-)

Anyway, no one has yet succeeded at this and if you feel you can get a program to imitate a human for 5 minutes, go right ahead. You'll earn that $100K :-)

Woz

The Turing Test -- real experience.

[SEE]

I was on a MUD. Somebody struck up a conversation with me, and then suddenly stopped. He turned to a companion and said, "OC: I feel really dumb -- I actually thought that 'bot was another player."

I must say that I was rather embarassed at being thought a 'bot, and immediately denied it -- at which point the other player said, "OC: Well, it is really believeable -- see how it even denied it was a 'bot? Whoever wrote it was good."

You're not fooling anyone you know

[Greyfox]

We all know you're a bot, so you may as well stop trying to fool everyone.