Supercomputer passes Turing test by mimicking a teenager

A supercomputer has finally passed the Turing test for intelligent behaviour, fooling 33 percent of judges into thinking it was a 13 year old boy.

The pass requirement for the Turing test is only 30 percent, which may seem quite low but, given that the test is now 64 years old and this mark has only just been passed, is still impressive.

The Turing test essentially asks a computer to make conversation with a human – via text, not speech – and be good enough at it to fool the human into thinking the respondent is a person.

Developers Vladimir Veselov and Eugene Demchenko say that the key ingredients to creating Eugene were both a plausible personality (a teen who thinks he knows more than he does) and a dialog system adept at handling more than direct questions.

Many have previously claimed to have passed the Turing test, only to be shot down in later testing. but the developers argue that theirs was a true test, where there were no topics deemed off-limits. They also had independent verification for the results.

Although the Turing test is one prominent step towards true AI, we’re still a long way off truly sentient beings.

Either way, it makes for a nice way to mark the 60th anniversary of Alan Turing’s death.