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.
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...
