Alan Turing wrote a seminal paper in 1950 titled ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence’.  In it, he states that a thinking computer is impossible to distinguish from a human in text-based conversation.  Alan Turing further hypothesized that a 30% chance existed a computer could be mistaken for a human in a five minute conversation by the end of the 20th Century. 

Reading University recently conducted the Turing Test to examine this theory.  A panel of human judges were tasked with evaluating conversations to determine if they were computer or human.  While some of the computer results were impressive, none of the computer programs passed the Turing Test.  An AI named Elbot won the Loebner Prize, though, by convincing “a quarter of the judges”.  Although the results may not seem staggering, it does bring into focus that it’s possible within our lifetime AI will exist that is indistinguishable from a human.

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4 Comments

  1. Technology will one day lead us to creating computers that are not only able to impersonate human beings, but surpass us.

  2. I don’t believe computers will ever truly be superior to us. We still will always posses skills no computer could ever be programmed to recognize. Once we create a computer that is smarter than us in some ways, or all ways, we can then use it as a compendium for all human knowledge, much like the Internet, or perhaps a new version of the Internet or “Cloud”. I really don’t believe we will ever be surpassed and destroyed by “evil overlords” but we will one day create a super computer far beyond anything ever seen before. I believe the date for such an event could be around 2030 or earlier.

    But that’s just my crazy theory.

  3. I first want to comment about the picture you put for illustration, I thought it was funny. technology developed rapidly once for the skarang maybe we can think of something that was impossible and make it in the world of technology .

  4. maybe those like me who are pretty much technology and internet oriented and are online for many hours every day can spot a difference between a bot / script and a real person chatting, but one of my marketing friend really kept talking to a bot/script for few minutes without having any clue that it was a script even at the end of the conversation.

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