Computer passes 'Turing Test' for the first time after convincing users it is human

[Jim__]

39. Yes, and according to Massimo Pigliucci, there were 3 judges, 1 was fooled.

An excerpt from his column:

Except, of course, that little of the above is true, and it matters even less. First, let’s get the facts straight: what actually happened [3] was that a chatterbot (i.e., a computer script), not a computer, has passed the Turing test at a competition organized by the Royal Society in London. Second, there is no reason whatsoever to think that the chatterbot in question, named “Eugene Goostman” and designed by Vladimir Veselov, is sentient, or even particularly intelligent. It’s little more than a (clever) parlor trick. Third, this was actually the second time that a chatterbot passed the Turing test, the other one was Cleverbot, back in 2011 [4]. Fourth, Eugene only squeaked by, technically convincing “at least 30% of the judges” for a mere five minutes: there were three judges, one was fooled. Fifth, Veseloy cheated somewhat, by giving Eugene the “personality” of a 13-yr old Ukrainian boy, which thereby somewhat insulated the chatterbot from potential problems caused by its poor English or its inept handling of some questions. As you can see, the whole thing was definitely hyped in the press.

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Turing proposed his famous test back in 1951, calling it “the imitation game.” The idea stemmed out of his famous work on what is now known as the Church-Turing hypothesis [6], the idea that “computers” (very broadly defined) can carry out any task that can be encoded by an algorithm. Turing was interested in the question of whether machines can think, and he was likely influenced by the then cutting edge research approach in psychology, behaviorism [7], whose rejection of the idea of internal mental states as either fictional or not accessible scientifically led psychologists for a while to study human behavior from a strictly externalist standpoint. Since the question of machine thought seemed to be even more daunting than the issue of how to study human thought, Turing’s choice made perfect sense at the time. This, of course, was well before many of the modern developments in computer science, philosophy of mind, neurobiology and cognitive science.