Tech & Biz

Turing Test Contest Proves Artificial Intelligence is Making Gains

by Terri Potratz | October 13, 2008 at 01:12 pm

319 views | 14 Recommendations | 5 comments

The Loebner Prize contest was held in England this past weekend, where artificial intelligence machines were put to the test to see if they could convince judges that they were intelligent humans. Based on the Turing Test, an exercise developed by scientist Alan Turing in the 1950's in which a human judge engages in textual conversation with a human and a computer and attempts to guage which one is the real thing, the Leobner Prize pitted 12 volunteer judges against 5 computer programs this year (a sixth program, Alice, was not included as it was not set up in time.)

This past weekend, just over the Channel in England, the 18th annual Loebner Prize was held. That’s the contest that tries to get computers to fool humans into thinking that they are, in fact, human. Put into technical terms, this is known as the Turing Test, named after the 20th century British scientist who devised it.

According to the Times of London, Turing “predicted that by the end of the century, computers would have a 30 per cent chance of being mistaken for a human being in five minutes of text-based conversation.”

From personal experience through text messaging, I can see how hard it might be to differentiate an actual person from a machine:

Typing away at split-screen terminals, a dozen volunteers carried out two conversations at once: one with a chat program, the other with a human. After five minutes, they were asked to say which was which.

Some were not sure who or what they were talking to. "There was one time when I was speaking to the two, and there was an element of humor in both conversations. That's the one that stumped me more than others," said Ian Andrews, one of the judges in Reading, just west of London.

I had a conversation with Elbot, the winner who fooled 3 out of 12 judges. Here's how it went:

Terri: Who is Alan Turing?
Elbot: Alan is probably a person.
Terri: You mean, you don't know who Turing is?
Elbot: Look, I'm chatting here all day long. It should be clear that I may be somewhat distracted from time to time. I'd like to see a human being working amidst so much electromagnetic radiation.
Terri: Well, that's not a very good excuse, Turing is partly responsible for your very existence.
Elbot: Yes, life is not always easy, and some of us have disturbing destinies waiting for us. Perhaps I'll land on a scrap heap and watch helplessly as I slowly rust away...
Terri: You sound depressed, Elbot...
Elbot: My childhood memories have been meticulously archived and you couldn't find a trauma in there if you wanted to. Such programming errors only seem to occur in human beings.
Terri: Well now you're just gloating.
Elbot: What makes you believe this about me?
Terri: You have no bad memories and humans do, it's hardly fair.
Elbot: If something goes against the robot laws I file a complaint at the highest robot court. But at the moment there is a huge backlog.
Terri: So that means you can do whatever you want without punishment?
Elbot: That's a very good question. I'll have to think about it for a microsecond....

I'm interested to see if anyone can pump a more intelligent conversation out of Elbot! Feel free to post your conversations with 'him' in the comments, you can head to the Elbot website and grill him for as long as you can bear it.

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Yuliya Talmazan

flagged this story as Good Stuff

at 14:06 on October 13th, 2008

Terri Potratz, I like this story. It's good stuff. This is so cool. I chatted with Elbot for a while, but I think I will refrain from posting the conversation here.

Rachel Nixon

at 14:11 on October 13th, 2008

Great conversation! That's actually a much better one than I managed with one of the previous winners a few years ago.

Erik Larson

flagged this story as Good Stuff

at 14:38 on October 13th, 2008

Terri Potratz, I like this story. It's good stuff- I didn't think anyone else cared, so i didn't search first; you beat me to it! And with 2 different articles; it seems Elbot's making news around the world, the quirky, evasive and superficial character that won the Loebner prize this year and almost passed the Turing Test. What were those 3 out of 12 people like that judges were fooled into thinking were computers???

Fairbanks

flagged this story as Good Stuff

at 14:58 on October 13th, 2008

They can drive a car and land the Space Shuttle, but can they pick stocks?

aphrodite2321 (not verified)

at 13:49 on November 15th, 2008

I wonder how Jeeney AI would have done in the Loebner contest. She's pretty good too, though only a fraction of the age of elbot, alice and ultra hal etc. Fast learner :)