Sunday, June 8, 2014

Supercomputer passes the Turing test by mimicking a teenager

After 64 long years, it looks like a machine has finally passed the Turing test for artificial intelligence. A supercomputer in a chat-based challenge fooled 33 percent of judges into thinking that it was Eugene Goostman, a fictional 13 year old boy; that's just above the commonly accepted Turing test's 30 percent threshold. Developers Vladimir Veselov and Eugene Demchenko say that the key ingredients were both a plausible personality (a teen who thinks he knows more than he does) and a dialog system adept at handling more than direct questions.

You'd have good reason to be skeptical about such bold claims. Others have touted success in the Turing test, only to be shot down later; even then, 33 percent isn't exactly a decisive margin of victory. However, Eugene's creators argue that theirs was a true test, where there were no topics deemed off-limits. They also had independent verification for the results.

AI like Eugene is still far from being truly persuasive, let alone sentient. Still, this could be a significant milestone in building computers that mimic the subtleties of human conversation. The timing is also exceptionally fitting -- it came both on the 60th anniversary of Alan Turing's death, and just months after the computing legend received a pardon that put the spotlight back on his achievements.

0 Comments Share

Via: The Telegraph

Source: University of Reading

Tags: ai, alanturing, artificialintelligence, computers, computing, royalsociety, royalsocietyoflondon, supercomputer, turing, turingtest, universityofreading Next: Android can now wake you up when you're close to your bus stop .fyre .fyre-comment-divider

View the Original article

No comments:

Post a Comment