Eugene Goostman is the first AI to pass the Turing Test

Posted on Tuesday, June 10 2014 @ 13:00 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
A new milestone in artificial intelligence has been reached as a bot finally managed to pass the Turing Test. At an event at the Royal Society in England, a 13-year-old AI boy called Eugene Goostman managed to convince 33 percent of the judged that he was human.

The real-world implications of this are pretty limited though, the Turing test doesn't deal with actual intelligence and is merely concerned with external behavior. In the case of this AI bot, all he had to do was to imitate a 13-year-old boy from Odessa, Ukraine. The test can be passed by following a completely predetermined set of rules, without giving the AI bot the capability to learn or react to new situations that they haven't been programmed for.
The modern-day Turing Test isn’t quite like that, though. In this case, Eugene Goostman — an AI developed by Vladimir Veselov, Eugene Demchenko, and Sergey Ulasen — is a chatterbot. Eugene is basically just a text box on a website: You type your message into the box, and then Eugene responds. At the event held at the Royal Society in London — organized by the University of Reading to celebrate the 60th anniversary of Turing’s death — a number of judges had a five-minute “conversation” with Eugene. 33% of the judges believed him to be human, passing the 30% threshold mandated by Turing, and thus becoming the first AI to pass the Turing Test.

By this point, you can probably tell that the Turing Test — especially the modern-day variation — is rather flawed. For a start, the judges already know ahead of time that computers are involved, and thus may be prejudiced to give a more optimistic (or cynical) response. We also don’t know what questions the judges asked (were they the right questions?) Presumably the test carried out at the Royal Society was double-blind (the judges didn’t know if they were talking to a human or a chatterbot), but the official press release doesn’t mention it, so maybe not (in which case, the results are worthless). But most of all, it’s important to note that the Turing Test doesn’t actually deal with actual intelligence — it’s only concerned with external behavior — how the machine acts — rather than what’s going on inside.
Source: ExtremeTech


About the Author

Thomas De Maesschalck

Thomas has been messing with computer since early childhood and firmly believes the Internet is the best thing since sliced bread. Enjoys playing with new tech, is fascinated by science, and passionate about financial markets. When not behind a computer, he can be found with running shoes on or lifting heavy weights in the weight room.



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