Chatbot attains milestone at annual Turing Testcompetition

Eugene Goostman, a program simulating a 13-year-old Ukrainian boy, has attained a 33% success rate at the annual RSA Turing Test competition, meaning that a third of the judges were fooled into thinking that the chatbot was actually a human being. Alan Turing's iconic test was meant to cut through the existentialist crisis in artificial intelligence about what was or wasn't "intelligence" by proposing that if a human being could not distinguish between a person and code in a blind test, the code was intelligent by human standards.

The Goostman bot enjoyed the advantage of simulating someone whose first language wasn't English, and whose apparent young age could explain a lack of nuanced reasoning and basic knowledge, so you could think of this as kind of a cheat, but it's still a very impressive feat. Read the rest