
Turing Test Success - stevejalim
http://www.reading.ac.uk/news-and-events/releases/PR583836.aspx
======
skywhopper
Where did the 30% requirement come from? Sounds like something the contest
organizers added to make it possible to "pass" without fooling 2/3 of the
judges. Using a young teenager as a character also seems like a cheat unless
they had other 13-year olds to be the judges. The character needs to be a peer
to the judges. Most 13 year olds behave oddly enough in the opinion of most
adults that it's got to be easier to credit weird behavior to generational or
cultural differences. So kudos to the winners on strategy, and boo to the
contest organizers for having such poor rules.

~~~
mcguire
30% of the time, five minute conversations, a "simulated" 13-year old? At
least "the conversations were unrestricted".

The Turing test is not a _test_. Instead, it is an operational definition of
"intelligence", a very slight formalization of the idea that something is
intelligent if it _seems to be intelligent_.

As a test, it obviously has to have some kind of limits like this
"competition", but as soon as you put limits on it then it stops being useful
and becomes both gameable and meaningless. The Turing test has already been
passed, long ago, if you have limits suitable to the Doctor or Parry.

~~~
TillE
> Instead, it is an operational definition of "intelligence"

Exactly. It's a straightforward formulation of what a strong AI would be
capable of. It makes no sense to have a restricted Turing test that can be
passed by a useless chatbot. It means absolutely nothing.

~~~
andreasvc
I assume you mean weak AI. And I don't see how you can dismiss the meaning of
passing this test so easily. Although it's a trivial example, I can definitely
see such chatbots being applied for spamming purposes, which by definition
exploits hapless victims.

~~~
mcguire
No, I think that's a correct use of strong AI.[1] "Strong AI" is work towards
general-purpose intelligence, at least as sentient, conscious, intelligent, or
whatever term you prefer to use as you are. "Weak AI" is work towards usefully
solving problems that would previously have been thought to require general
intelligence, such as chess programs or self-driving cars.

[1] Although usage may be changing. Pity.

~~~
andreasvc
Weak AI is when a computer can (appear to) act intelligently, strong AI is
when a computer can actually think (Russell & Norvig). Therefore, passing a
Turing test would be a textbook example of weak AI, because you only need to
simulate intelligence well enough to fool the judge.

~~~
mcguire
Like I said, usage is changing.

I studied AI shortly after the "AI Winter", which is where I got my
definition. Strong AI---working towards a general intelligence---was strongly
out of favor, especially with funding agencies. It still remains so (but see
Watson). But solving limited problems heuristically (or statistically) that
are not otherwise algorithmically tractable (a loose translation of "would
appear to require general intelligence") has always been a fertile field.

Turing's argument, which is a philosophical argument, is not meaningful if you
put any limits on it---time, topic, behavior (really, Parry is better than the
Doctor), which is why it is better thought of as a thought experiment. If you
have limits such that it can be gamed, then yes, it is fair to say "you only
need to simulate intelligence well enough to fool the judge." Which makes it
uninteresting.

But the question is, if you can "simulate intelligence" well enough under any
conceivable circumstance (and yes, all actual human beans will fail here), how
can you say that it cannot "actually think"?

------
mratzloff
The Turing Test is a terrible measure of sapience. Generally it involves using
"average people", who have been shown time and again to be overly credulous
when talking to these bots. If the test is to be used at all, it should
consist of computer science experts instead--people familiar with the
technology and bot tricks of the trade.

That the Turing Test is still used is proof that we still don't understand how
to even define sapience. Without a definition and concrete, testable
qualities, how can we possibly hope to ever build artificial sapience. As a
result, we continue to see these toys that are little more than parlor tricks.

Any true test should include looking behind the curtain. "I _know_ you're
artificial--I can see the processes working--yet I have doubts that what I'm
seeing is real."

In other words, real success is the tester believing he is being fooled when
he is not, rather than fooling the tester into believing it is real.

~~~
mcguire
That we don't understand how to define intelligence is exactly the point.
That's why the Turing test is interesting.

The problem with "looking behind the curtain" is that it traditionally boils
down to what I like to think of as the subtle fluid model of intelligence. If
you know what is behind the curtain, then obviously it can't be intelligent,
because it is not running on the right hardware, for gooey definitions of
hardware, or because it doesn't have some Homunculus of Definite Understanding
(Hi, Serle!), or because _we can see behind the curtain_ and know what it is
doing. Obviously, if we know what it is doing, it is not intelligent, right?

~~~
gtremper
I was fortunate enough to take a philosophy of mind class from Searle during
my Computer Science undergrad. Very interesting experience.

~~~
mcguire
It has been a while since I read him, and I don't think I ever got a
satisfactory answer: how _does_ he get around the unbounded recursion of the
Chinese room argument?

~~~
gtremper
I never agreed with him completely on his views in this regard, but his main
point is if you have a system that's governed by rules on input (Like someone
looking up the answer in the Chinese room), there's no subjective
understanding. So even if you had such a device(room) that behaved flawlessly,
there's nothing in there that actually "understands" what's going on. The
paper that the Chinese characters are written on doesn't understand, they're
paper. And the person carrying out the instructions doesn't understand either,
they're just following orders. So what's having the subjective
experience/understanding?

The main point I took away is that he feels that consciences is an ordinary
biological process, and a simulation of that process is not the same as the
process. In the same way that a computer simulation of a stomach digesting
food isn't the same as an actually stomach digesting food. No matter how good
the simulation is, it doesn't actually digest food. So a simulation of
consciences, isn't actually consciences, and doesn't have a personal
subjective experience.

------
xpose2000
Perhaps I just asked the right questions, but I just had a lovely conversation
with 'Eugene'.

I asked him a few questions like where he lived, his name, if he has brothers
or sisters, if he wears glasses, etc. Eventually he started asking me
questions like what I did for a living and where I lived. He also managed to
form questions based on my answers.

It almost _felt_ like a conversation. I can honestly say, I've never thought
that before while talking to an AI. So far I am pretty impressed.

~~~
frabcus
Is there somewhere online you can talk to him?

~~~
umanwizard
[http://www.princetonai.com/bot/bot.jsp](http://www.princetonai.com/bot/bot.jsp)

~~~
AndrewKemendo
Realize that this version is from 2001 and is not the version that was in the
recent test.

------
radio4fan
Awesome job of putting un-followable links in the press release, Reading
University.

I'm going to take this with a hug pinch of salt until I've read the
transcripts, due to the involvement of famous publicity-hound Kevin Warwick.

~~~
reillyse
Yes, at this stage any time I read his name involved with something I cringe.

------
eli_gottlieb
Managing to successfully imitate an ignorant, immature child 1/3 of the time
is _not_ what I would call a _success_ , but rather a subversion of the entire
intent behind the Turing Test in the first place.

~~~
splike
I think you're probably expecting to see a 50/50 chance (or higher) of
guessing it was a computer. But if you think about it, anything better than
50% would make it more human than a human. So is why the target is lower than
50%

~~~
GhotiFish
Wait, could you explain how a program that is capable of being mistaken for a
human more than 50% of the time is more human than human?

I'm pretty sure you're human, with a high degree of confidence, much higher
than 50%.

So to are you more human than human?

~~~
qu4z-2
I believe that in the original formulation of the Turing Test the judges were
asked to hold two conversations: one with a computer and one with a human.
Afterwards they chose which of the two they believed to be the human. In that
scenario, being identified as "human" more than 50% of the time would indeed
make you "more human than human"; with a "perfectly human" program the test
becomes essentially a coin-toss. In that context the 30% threshold makes a
good deal of sense.

But in this variant, "Do you believe the entity you spoke with to be a human
or a program?", a 100% threshold is theoretically achievable. That means
you're entirely correct: a 51% vote of confidence is decidedly less human than
human. Additionally the 30% threshold they've used is laughably low in this
context. Without a control group, even an 100%-confidence outcome probably
says more about the beliefs of the judges than the ability of the program to
simulate a human.

I don't mean to take away from the no-doubt impressive achievement by the team
behind Eugene. I just take issue with the hyperbole in its reporting. But, ya
know, the media will be the media, and academics gotta get research grants.

~~~
GhotiFish
ahh. That's almost certainly what splike meant. Thanks.

------
thinkersilver
I remember reading the first chapter on an AI book during college which laid
out the objectives of AI research into two schools of thought.The first school
of thought believes that AI can be achieved by mimicking real conscious
beings. Remember when man first tried to fly, most devices mimicked birds and
failed horribly. The other school of thought believes that intelligence has
well-defined principles, when discovered, would produce real intelligence (not
mimicry), having the effect that the final product may not resemble what we
see on day to day basis. Compare planes, which use the principles of flight,
to the early flapping machines. A bird and plane both fly but they are very
different in the way they do it. Approaching flight from the mimicry angle is
hard, it's only recently in the last 10 years we have made light-weight
flapping machines that fly well;yet we have had planes for over a hundred
years once we knew the principles.

Transcripts would be handy. I doubt a conversation with a 13 year old boy is a
good way to measure AI? It's not the best metric to have but it is the most
universal and most widely agreed on that we have. It seems like we are happier
with small gains in mimicry for now, since real intelligence is hard. Really
hard.

~~~
acchow
> The first school of thought believes that AI can be achieved by mimicking
> real conscious beings

It's important to note the true meaning behind this school of thought - that
mimicry and "true" intelligence are actually equivalent. Behaviorists believe
this, and the validity of the Turing Test along with it.

~~~
swombat
I think it might actually be in Civ5 that I first heard the following quote:

"Asking whether a computer can think is about as useful as asking whether a
submarine can swim."

I think this is fairly insightful and relevant.

~~~
marcosdumay
That's from Djigstra.

I digress. Most of the times, mimicking Nature works very well. We tend to
always remember our most spectacular failure, but that's a selection bias.

~~~
andreasvc
His name is Dijkstra. I'm curious how you arrive at the conclusion that
mimicking nature works most of the time, do you have some examples?

~~~
marcosdumay
Looks like the post is too old, and I can't correct it anymore. On my defense,
I was quite tired when I wrote it.

You don't have to go very far looking for examples. The fictional Nautilus
submarine was named after the animal Julio Verne copied its depth control
system (the same one all real submarines use till today). Also, the first
submarines' shape copied whales, a design that was adapted (but not completely
replaced) because it does not work as well witout also copying their
propulsion system.

By the way, birds wings are better than planes ones in several important ways
(but worse in a few others). We don't copy them because we don't have good
enough materials, not because it's not a good idea.

------
fchollet
The Turing test is to our understanding of intelligence what sleight of hand
is to our understanding of physics. Tricking people, as a goal, is not
conductive to science.

A researcher claiming to have passed the Turing test instantly discredits
himself as a prestidigitator looking for PR buzz. The present article is a
textbook example of this.

As a side note, if you are focusing on disembodied, language-based human-like
intelligence, then the paradigm you operate in is many decades behind. The
Turing test was conceived at a time when the notion of thinking machines had
just started to emerge --a very different time from today, where we have 60
years of AI research behind us. The Turing test has been irrelevant for longer
than most AI researchers have been alive. I have never seen it used for
anything else than smoke-and-mirrors PR operations.

~~~
acchow
Your opinion is not universally accepted. (Perhaps not even mainstream?).

There's an element of behaviorism which stretches back to Descartes - how can
you know that I exist? That I think? You can only observe through my behavior;
that my behavior mimics yours.

How then can we judge machines any other way?

~~~
fchollet
The Turing test only tests for mimicry in human conversation, not
"intelligence" as measured through a behavioral framework.

A better "Turing test" proposed a few years ago was, "develop a team of robots
that play soccer so well they can win the World Cup". While not the best
possible driver of AI research, the quest for such a goal would still drive AI
research orders or magnitude better than "trick random people to mistake a
chatbot for a human".

~~~
TeMPOraL
Is it really better? It sounds completely within capabilities of current
robotics and algorithms. Mix up DARPA robots and AI from FIFA and you'll
likely have a winning team.

~~~
fchollet
Please. That is many decades away, and the hard part about it is definitely
not the soccer strategy AI...

------
danbruc
Surly they did not talk to this one [1] - it is light-years away from being
convincing.

[1] [http://www.princetonai.com/bot/](http://www.princetonai.com/bot/)

~~~
keehun
I was impressed it could write grammatically sound sentences, but it's not
even close to human-level conversation...

~~~
jamesrom
I would be impressed if it didn't. If it made common mistakes a human would
make, it would seem more human.

------
Mithaldu
Bold claim, but without any transcripts it's impossible to verify just how
close to the truth the claim comes.

~~~
GhotiFish
That's true. I want to talk to Eugine. Your suggestion seems to be the very
minimum.

------
codeulike
When people imagine what a Turing Test conversation would look like, they
frequently underestimate the conversation. I find Dennet's example of an
imaginary Turing Test from Consciousness Explained to be a good
counterexample:

 _Judge: Did you hear about the Irishman who found a magic lamp? When he
rubbed it a genie appeared and granted him three wishes. “I’ll have a pint of
Guiness!” the Irishman replied and immediately it appeared. The Irishman
eagerly set to sipping and then gulping, but the level of Guiness in the glass
was always magically restored. After a while the genie became impatient.
“Well, what about your second wish?” he asked. Replied the Irishman between
gulps, “Oh well, I guess I’ll have another one of these.”

CHINESE ROOM: Very funny. No, I hadn’t heard it– but you know I find ethnic
jokes in bad taste. I laughed in spite of myself, but really, I think you
should find other topics for us to discuss.

J: Fair enough but I told you the joke because I want you to explain it to me.

CR: Boring! You should never explain jokes.

J: Nevertheless, this is my test question. Can you explain to me how and why
the joke “works”?

CR: If you insist. You see, it depends on the assumption that the magically
refilling glass will go on refilling forever, so the Irishman has all the
stout he can ever drink. So he hardly has a reason for wanting a duplicate but
he is so stupid (that’s the part I object to) or so besotted by the alcohol
that he doesn’t recognize this, and so, unthinkingly endorsing his delight
with his first wish come true, he asks for seconds. These background
assumptions aren’t true, of course, but just part of the ambient lore of joke-
telling, in which we suspend our disbelief in magic and so forth. By the way
we could imagine a somewhat labored continuation in which the Irishman turned
out to be “right” in his second wish after all, perhaps he’s planning to throw
a big party and one glass won’t refill fast enough to satisfy all his thirsty
guests (and it’s no use saving it up in advance– we all know how stale stout
loses its taste). We tend not to think of such complications which is part of
the explanation of why jokes work. Is that enough? _

Dennett: "The fact is that any program that could actually hold up its end in
the conversation depicted would have to be an extraordinary supple,
sophisticated, and multilayered system, brimming with “world knowledge” and
meta-knowledge and meta-meta-knowledge about its own responses, the likely
responses of its interlocutor, and much, much more…. Maybe the billions of
actions of all those highly structured parts produce genuine understanding in
the system after all."

I'm sure they didn't get anywhere near this with their 13-yr-old simulation.
But this gives an idea of the heights AI has to scale before it can regularly
pass the Turing Test.

~~~
lukeschlather
That excerpt reads to me like writing, not conversation. Someone spent some
time polishing it. I know people who can talk like that extemporaneously, but
I'd wager 99% of native English speakers wouldn't pass if that's the bar.

~~~
ghshephard
I thought that was an obvious example of a computer system, as it was a
labored and overly detailed description. I would have immediately flagged it
as a computer system, and not a human.

~~~
codeulike
Well OK, but if you had a conversation like that with a bot, would you be
prepared to consider the bot as being conscious? Thats the deeper question
that the Turing Test is really about, rather than human/not human.

~~~
ghshephard
You know - Marc Andreessen was tweeting about this today - and he held the
same view as you. But, every book I've read on Turing, and every article I've
read on the Turing tests suggests that the _entire idea_ behind the turing
test was to _not_ get caught up on concepts such as "thinking" or
"intelligence" \- but to just posit a test to see if a machine could imitate
thinking behavior. This then, provides a nice unambiguous target for research
and development, without worrying about being caught up in the semantics of
the conversation.

~~~
netcan
Perhaps the lesson is that no matter what your starting intention, the rules
of a competitive game are going to be optimized for. You might start out with
the goal of creating a general test of physical prowess. A 50m sprint, weight
lifting contest or even a wrestling match is too specific so you invent a
general game where strength, speed, endurance, etc. matter and you call it
rugby.

If no one had heard of the rules in advance, rugby would be a pretty decent
test of general physical prowess. Maybe not 100% perfect, but out of a
population of 1000, the 50 best rugby players would probably match most
people's top 50 list of physical specimens well enough.

But, once you have people training and optimizing for it, you find that (a)
training for rugby specifically matters. (b) Rugby is optimizing for a
particular set of physical characteristics.

Chat bots designed to win the game are basically designed to fool people into
thinking that they're human because that's the game. It isn't really a good
proxy for consciousness.

~~~
codeulike
But if I was talking to a bot and it was able to hold a conversation as
complex as the one above, for a long time and without glitches etc, I'd be
prepared to consider it 'conscious'. You have to consider how difficult it
would be to pass a Turing Test _reliably_ with a decent judge who took the
conversation in interesting directions.

re: Chat bots designed to win games: Some say that's exactly what we are! -
The Social Brain Hypothesis of the evolution of human intelligence suggests
that the reason our brains grew so big was that intelligence (via ability to
deal with social groups) became a large factor in reproductive success.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_human_intelligence...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_human_intelligence#Social_brain_hypothesis)

~~~
netcan
I guess what I am saying is that I think the Turing test was a way to
demonstrate an idea without being able to define it specifically.

I think the focus on Turing tests is interesting and has definitely expanded
knowledge in this area. But, it is now an area within the search for
artificial consciousness. It no longer works as a test for it as it would if a
computer just happened to stumble on the test and pass it.

That said, I do thing that where we are visa a vis the Test is a cool
benchamark. I would be over the moon if one of the Turing bots got to the
point where it could do a job, like being a customer support bot.

Hopefully someplace slightly north of the Turing test goal post there will be
commercial goal posts to encourage development, hopefully a conversational
user interface. A convincing chatbot as a user interface would present lot of
very interesting challenges.

~~~
codeulike
Well yes there's kinda two different views of the Turing Test:

1) Consciousness is really hard to define so the Turing Test is a handy
workable yardstick that AI can use as a milestone until we get a proper
working definition of consciousness

2) (Hard-AI, behaviourist position) Appearing to be conscious and being
conscious are the same thing. Hence the Turing Test is about as good a
definition of consciousness as we are ever likely to get. Perhaps it could be
tightened up a little - insisting on really long conversations with lots of
complexity etc. But a good judge running a test over a longish time period
would see to that.

------
VLM
The point missed is the Turing test was an abstract thought experiment into
how we perceive the presence of intelligence.

If a decade or so of social media (whatever that means) has proven anything,
its that very little intelligence occurs in virtually all conversations.

The meta Turing test is being failed by many people who think it (a concrete
implementation of it) means something. Much like actually building a well
sealed box with a cat, a radioisotope source, and a geiger counter wouldn't
actually be a "great step forward for Quantum Physics" in 2014. Any more than
making a little anthropomorphic horned robot and having him divert fast "hot"
molecules one direction or slow "cold" molecules another would be a great step
forward for thermodynamics in 2014.

The value of a thought experiment is realized when its proposed, not when
someone makes a science fair demonstration of the abstract idea.

------
vixin
Lots of self-congratulation all round with no sample questions to provide the
merest smidgeon of 'reason to believe that this is that significant'.

------
DanBC
> If a computer is mistaken for a human more than 30% of the time during a
> series of five minute keyboard conversations it passes the test. No computer
> has ever achieved this, until now. Eugene managed to convince 33% of the
> human judges that it was human.

Surely it depends on who the human judges are. It seems a bit unfair that the
judges normally have IQ > 100 and the other humans have IQ > 100.

I strongly suspect that some simplistic AI (alicebots, for example) would beat
the Turing test if the human judges had IQ between 90 and 105. (Especially if
we're using the limited 30% rule above).

Getting bots running on some Facebook groups might be interesting.

------
monochr
"a computer programme that simulates a 13 year old boy [...] If a computer is
mistaken for a human more than 30% of the time during a series of five minute
keyboard conversations it passes the test."

In short they did nothing.

------
ma2rten
I don't know exactly how Eugene works, but I am quite sure like most chat bots
it simply reacts to keywords or preprogrammed patterns. Basically it's Eliza
[0], but with more scripts. I believe most people here would not give it
credit for winning an intelligence test.

There is actually more than one bot, which has been claimed to have passed the
Turing Test before. Cleverbot is one of them [1]. There are also several
competitions, but I believe the most reputable and long standing one is the
Loebner Prize [2]. The bot that currently holds the Loeber Prize is Mitsuku
[3].

Anyway, you can chat with Eugene at [4], I gave it a try. I believe there is
one thing that the creators of Eugene got right. When chatting with other chat
bots, I usually in a situation where the bot says something, I ask I followup
question (like "Why?"), and it gives a generic answer like "Because I say so"
or "I don't know". Eugene does the same but will ask a unrelated followup
question right together with the response. That way at least there is not a
weird pause in the conversation.

[0] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA)

[1] [http://www.geekosystem.com/cleverbot-passes-turing-
test/](http://www.geekosystem.com/cleverbot-passes-turing-test/)

[2] [http://www.loebner.net/Prizef/loebner-
prize.html](http://www.loebner.net/Prizef/loebner-prize.html)

[3] [http://www.mitsuku.com](http://www.mitsuku.com)

[4]
[http://www.princetonai.com/bot/bot.jsp](http://www.princetonai.com/bot/bot.jsp)

------
scotty79
Any chance of seeing conversation logs?

------
inetsee
Although the Turing Test is interesting, it is not, in my opinion, all that
useful. I would much rather see chess program level of performance in the
domain of medical diagnosis, for example.

There are lots of other domains where I would be entirely happy to know that I
was talking to an AI, if the answers I was getting were significantly better
than most human experts in that domain.

------
jestinjoy1
"If a computer is mistaken for a human more than 30% of the time during a
series of five minute keyboard conversations it passes the test. No computer
has ever achieved this, until now. Eugene managed to convince 33% of the human
judges that it was human."

SO the result can very depending on different conditions. :) Highly non
deterministic

------
sfbsfbsfb
Me: Do you have more hair on your head or on your eyelash? Goostman: If I say
that I haven't more hair on my head or on my eye lash - will it satisfy your
inquisitive mind? By the way, what's your occupation? I mean - could you tell
me about your work?

This is not passing the Turing test by any stretch of the imagination.

------
Bayesianblues
I've often wondered if the Turing Test has been decoupled from signifying its
original goal due to an instance of Goodhart's Law; namely, "When a measure
becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."

Surely the ability to trick a human into believing an AI is a human is a
milestone, but it was with an AI specifically optimized for this task. The
deeper question is if the passing of the Turing Test in this case means we
should ascribe consciousness to the bot, and I think none of us are willing to
affirm it yet. I would suggest that this discrepancy is caused by the “measure
becoming a target” and losing its ability to be a “good measure.” I guess this
is why there is such a critical distinction between Artificial Intelligence
and Artificial General Intelligence, which is where the Turing Test would have
more weight.

------
e12e
Between this and the Ars Technica article[1], I'm still confused: Was this a
regular Turing test? Who was the humans that the machines tested against? As
far as I recall, the model is two participants, one human, one machine -- the
judges communicate with each through writing -- and if the machine "tests" as
human more than 30% of the time, it's considered a "win" at the imitation game
(the machine has successfully imitated being human). Both the machine and the
human are supposed to try to appear human.

(And this is extended from another form of the imitation game, where the goal
is to imitate being male, where participants are male and female)

Have anyone been able to find any more concrete information (and perhaps some
transcripts)? If not I hope someone will set up a new test, and invite
"Eugene" to participate.

[1] [http://arstechnica.com/information-
technology/2014/06/eugene...](http://arstechnica.com/information-
technology/2014/06/eugene-the-supercomputer-not-13-year-old-first-to-beat-the-
turing-test/)

[edit: We may be given some hints from the wikpedia article on the turing
test:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test#Imitation_Game_vs....](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test#Imitation_Game_vs._Standard_Turing_Test)

"Huma Shah and Kevin Warwick, who organised the 2008 Loebner Prize at Reading
University which staged simultaneous comparison tests (one judge-two hidden
interlocutors), showed that knowing/not knowing did not make a significant
difference in some judges' determination. Judges were not explicitly told
about the nature of the pairs of hidden interlocutors they would interrogate.
Judges were able to distinguish human from machine, including when they were
faced with control pairs of two humans and two machines embedded among the
machine-human set ups. Spelling errors gave away the hidden-humans; machines
were identified by 'speed of response' and lengthier utterances." ]

~~~
e12e
Some more information from Gizmodo:

[http://gizmodo.com/5921698/what-its-like-to-judge-the-
turing...](http://gizmodo.com/5921698/what-its-like-to-judge-the-turing-test)

(linked from [http://gizmodo.com/this-is-the-first-computer-in-history-
to-...](http://gizmodo.com/this-is-the-first-computer-in-history-to-have-
passed-th-1587780232) )

------
PythonicAlpha
A real test of (Artificial) intelligence would be, must include that it is
real capable of learning new things and developing and not trying to convince
others that it has learned something (what in this case in my opinion is
wrong, since it is just knowledge that is programmed into it -- meaning, not
its own knowledge, but borrowed knowledge of the programmers).

I would also add, that the real prove must include a topic that the artificial
person was not programmed for. (not like a Bayesian filter that "develops" by
"learning" new facts about a fixed topic).

Learning, developing, evolving, that are the real marks of living and of
intelligence (since, I would not part between intelligence and living).

------
draq
If it was hosted by the Royal Society, wouldn't it be on their website
([https://royalsociety.org/events/?type=all&direction=past](https://royalsociety.org/events/?type=all&direction=past))?

~~~
rahimnathwani
It was hosted _by_ the University of Reading _at_ the Royal Society.

[https://royalsociety.org/venue-hire/](https://royalsociety.org/venue-hire/)

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testingit
Spoken language is just a small part of overall communication. Today Turing
Test should consist of not only speaking but simulating, perhaps by a
streaming video, a professor in front of a class of wild students. He should
strive to capture their attention, to gain their respect and interest, to
understand their inner state of mind.

Speaking is only a way of getting into the stage. Once into the highlights you
must prove you are a leader or, if you decide so, that you are able to gain
the attention of your audience to emphasize something important that
previously was not perceived as such. That is speaking is an art, is not about
explaining a plot but about creating a story.

------
Morendil
That headline should read: "33% of human judges flunk the Turing Test".

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muglug
This looks awfully like a private event for Reading University that just
happens to have been held at the Royal Society. I wonder whether they even had
more than three non-"celebrity" judges.

------
alt_f4
Ah, Reading University - the powerhouse of computer science...

Move on people, it's just a cheap PR stunt.

------
ilaksh
Even though many AI researchers will agree that the Turing Test isn't a very
good representation of "real" intelligence, this is still a huge milestone.
Many, many researchers have tried and failed to pass the Turing Test.

But people will continue to dismiss the state of the art and deny that
computers have "real" intelligence, the same way they did when the computer
defeated Kasparov, the same way they did when we saw Googles self driving
cars, the same way they did when a computer won on Jeopardy, and now with the
Turing Test. Even when we have robots that look and act exactly like humans,
many people will say that they are not "really" intelligent and dismiss the
accomplishment. They will still be saying that when AIs twice as smart as
people arrive and they have to figure out what to do with billions of what
will then be, relatively speaking, mentally challenged people.

------
SilasX
>“I feel about beating the turing test in quite convenient way. Nothing
original,” said Goostman, when asked how he felt after his success.

So how long until the creator can pass the Turing Test?

(Normally I'd ignore that, but given the subject matter...)

------
dreeves
This doesn't seem like much of a milestone to me. If Ray Kurzweil wins this
bet against Mitch Kapor, that will be a milestone:
[http://longbets.org/1/](http://longbets.org/1/)

------
grondilu
Did they also run the experiment with an actual 13 yo kid?

~~~
DanBC
...Imagine someone releasing bots on XBOXLive. Your task is to guess which
obscenity-screaming 13 year okd is real and which is a bot.

Some forms of Turing test are trivially passable with dumb enough humans.

------
netcan
How feasible is it to have hosted state of the art Turing bots available to
the converse with anyone?

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cwhy
Failed.. Just keep saying hello to it and imagine it is a real people.

------
AndrewKemendo
You can watch the goal posts shifting for "AI" as we speak. Great result
nonetheless!

------
raldi
I appreciate HN's rule about brief, non-sensational submission titles, but
perhaps this one's taken it to the point of absurdism.

~~~
dang
It was the submitter's title, not a mod edit, if that matters. The submitter
did a good job, because the rest of the title ("marks milestone in computing
history") is certainly linkbait and arguably misleading. Having it there would
likely have made this thread a lower-quality controversy than it currently is.
HN threads are surprisingly sensitive to initial conditions.

Edit: Oh, and considering how many fluff press articles are showing up about
this [1], the submitter also showed exemplary taste in source selection. Yay,
stevejalim!

1\.
[https://hn.algolia.com/?q=turing+test#!/story/sort_by_date/0...](https://hn.algolia.com/?q=turing+test#!/story/sort_by_date/0/turing%20test)

~~~
hanru
It seems the submitter has passed your Turing test. ;)

------
lotsofmangos
looks like some smegging marketing smeg for smeg-heads

------
vonsydov
Stop bitching. Its passed. Get over it.

