subject "C" is tested to decide whether the individual is "A" or "B"

The Turing test is a proposal for a test of a machine‘s ability to demonstrate intelligence.

A human judge engages in a natural language conversation with one human and one machine, each of which try to appear human; if the judge cannot reliably tell which is which, then the machine is said to pass the test. In order to test the machine’s intelligence rather than its ability to render words into audio, the conversation is limited to a text-only channel such as a computer keyboard and screen (Turing originally suggested a teletype machine, one of the few text-only communication systems available in 1950).

To see how a journalist fared in discriminating between man and machine in a recent Turing test in October, read below. You may be surprised and a bit frightened……

Eugene Goostman is a 13-year-old boy from Odessa, Ukraine, the son of a talk-show host and a gynaecologist, who keeps a guinea pig called Bill in his bedroom and likes the science fiction novels of Sergei Lukyanenko and Kurt Vonnegut.

He is also a work of fiction, a software program written by a bio-scientist from St Petersburg and a finalist in a contest to find the world’s first thinking computer, staged yesterday at Reading University.

His task was to convince judges, in five minutes of conversation, that he was a human being who really had read Slaughterhouse Five and could plausibly shoot the breeze about it and any other topic under the sun.

I was one of those judges, and yesterday, I was fooled. I mistook Eugene for a real human being. In fact, and perhaps this is worse, he was so convincing that I assumed that the human being with whom I was simultaneously conversing was a computer.

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