Erik Sofge
at 09:00 AM Oct 8 2014

Eugene’s victory was short-lived. Within days, AI researchers had dismissed the chatbot’s achievement as a collection of canned responses. Then they took the Turing Test itself to task. Conceived of as a kind of existential parlor game, the test asks a human and a machine to respond to questions from remote interrogators. A computer mistaken for a person would prove that it had developed the capacity to mimic our own thought processes. 

Rafi Letzter
at 10:33 AM Sep 14 2014

Imagine standing in an open field with a bucket of water balloons and a couple of friends. You've decided to play a game called "Mind." Each of you has your own set of rules. Maybe Molly will throw a water balloon at Bob whenever you throw a water balloon at Molly. Maybe Bob will splash both of you whenever he goes five minutes without getting hit -- or if it gets too warm out or if it's seven o'clock or if he's in a bad mood that day. The details don't matter.

Erik Sofge
at 08:47 AM Jun 13 2014

By now, you may have heard that the Turing Test, that hallowed old test of machine intelligence proposed by pioneering mathematician Alan Turing in 1950, has been passed. In a contest held this past weekend, a chatbot posing as a 13-year-old Ukrainian boy fooled a third of its human judges into thinking it was a human. This prompted the University of Reading, which had organized the competition, to announce the acheivment of "an historic milestone in artificial intelligence." You may have also heard (because we said it) that this was a complete sham, and the academic equivalent of urinating directly on Turing’s grave...

Maki Naro
at 06:43 AM Jun 12 2014

By now you've all been swept up in the cult of personality of Eugene Goostman, the chatbot that made news when it convinced 10 out 30 judges at the University of Reading's 2014 Turing Test that it was human, thus winning the contest. With the announcement, every news source with two hundred words to spare was quick to crown Eugene Goostman as king of bots. But we should know better by now.

Francie Diep
at 01:11 AM Mar 14 2014
Science // 

Less than two years before he died, famed computer scientist Alan Turing wrote a biochemistry paper. Called "The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis," Turing theorized about how cells change and develop. Now, 60 years later, a team of scientists says it's provided some new experimental evidence that Turing was right (mostly). Their work offers Turing, who created the Turing test for artificial intelligence and decoded German messages for the Allies during World War II, one more feather for his cap.

Rebecca Boyle
at 02:08 AM Sep 29 2012
Tech // 

Two virtual gamers have convinced a panel of judges they were more human than the humans they competed with in a first-person shooter game, winning the five-year-old BotPrize and beating the Turing test of machine awareness. The game bots were video game characters controlled by artificially intelligent algorithms.

Colin Lecher
at 00:52 AM Jun 27 2012
Tech // 

Computer scientist Alan Turing's infamous Turing test - possibly the thing he's known best for out of a long resume - is a simple, solid bar for artificial intelligence that's held up since the 1950s. But this weekend that bar was nearly reached. Judges surveyed in the largest-ever Turing competition agreed 29 percent of the time that Eugene Goostman was a 13-year-old boy, and that was good enough for the chatbot to win.

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