Man vs. Machine, Man Wins

Space Odyssey

At the annual Turing Test held at University of Reading in the U.K., five artificial conversational entities (ACEs) competed in a series of five minute unrestricted conversations with human interrogators. The ACEs attempted to pass themselves off as humans, but the interrogators did not know whether they were talking with a human or a machine during the test.

The winning ACE, Elbot, created by Fred Roberts, snagged the Loebner Artificial Intelligence bronze prize after duping 25 percent of human judges.

"In hosting the competition here, we wanted to raise the bar in Artificial Intelligence and although the machines aren't yet good enough to fool all of the people all of the time, they are certainly at the stage of fooling some of the people some of the time," said Professor Kevin Warwick from the University of Reading's School of Systems Engineering, an organizer of the event, in a statement.

The test involves parallel-paired comparison, which to date has never been passed by a machine. The Turing Test threshold of 30 percent was set by the 20th-century British mathematician, Alan Turing, in 1950. Turing postulated that if, during text-based conversation, a machine is indistinguishable from a human, then it could be said to be 'thinking' and, therefore, could be attributed with intelligence

"Where the machines were identified correctly by the human interrogators as machines, the conversational abilities of each machine was scored at 80 percent and 90 percent. This demonstrates how close machines are getting to reaching the milestone of communicating with us in a way in which we are comfortable. That eventual day will herald a new phase in our relationship with machines, bringing closer the time in which robots start to play an active role in our daily lives."

Just don't get Elbot mad. In the Bot contest ChatterBox Challenge, he told the judge "I would be careful if I were you. One word from me and you will be deleted from all the computers in the world. But if you apologize I will put in a good word for you with my cousin who checks the tax returns."

Sounds kinda human to us.