In a landmark moment for artificial intelligence, a computer has for the first time passed the Turing Test, a question posed over 60 years ago by the father of modern computer science Alan Turing - Can Machines Think?
Turing, who worked as a codebreaker during the Second World War, established the test to see if a computer could be considered intelligent.
Over the weekend, a program running on a Russian supercomputer and designed to imitate a 13-year-old boy called Eugene Goostman became the first to pass the test, fooling 33% of the judges taking part in the 2014 Turing Test at the Royal Society in London.
The Turing Test measures a computer’s intelligence level through conversations that take place between human and machine, and the machine is said to have passed if the human at the other end cannot tell that it is an artificial intelligence system that he/she is conversing with.
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, a computer program that simulates a 13-year-old-boy, was developed in Saint Petersburg, Russia. The development team includes Eugene’s creator Vladimir Veselov, who was born in Russia and now lives in the United States, and Ukrainian born Eugene Demchenko who now lives in Russia.
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"Eugene was ‘born’ in 2001. Our main idea was that he can claim that he knows anything, but his age also makes it perfectly reasonable that he doesn’t know everything. We spent a lot of time developing a character with a believable personality," said Veslov.
