The Life and Times of 'Eugene Goostman,' Who Passed the Turing Test

Eugene Goostman is a smart-ass teenager, living in Ukraine and currently conducting conversations with inquisitive souls around the world. There's only one problem: Eugene is not a boy, he's a program. And he — or it — made headlines earlier this week when a new version of the chat bot finally passed a version of the Turing Test.

Developed by PrincetonAI (a small team of programmers and technologists not affiliated with Princeton University) and backed by a computer and some gee-whiz algorithms, "Eugene Goostman" was able to fool the Turing Test 2014 judges 33% of the time — good enough to surpass the threshold set by computer scientist Alan Turing in 1950. Turing believed that by 2000, computers would be able to, through five-minute text-based conversations, fool humans into believing that they were flesh and blood, at least 30% of the time. Depending on whom you talk to, Goostman's achievement is either a huge turning point for technology, or just another blip. Read more...