Good news all you robot overlord fans! Eugene Goostman, a Russian chatterbot, has become the first ever computer program to pass the Turing Test, named for mathematician Alan Turing. Turing is often lauded as the hero of the tech world, for both his work in coding and mathmatics, though his name is not as widespread as other pioneers of the field. Turing was imprisoned in 1952 for "gross indeceny"-a criminal charge for homosexuality. He committed suicide two years later. In 2013, he recieved a posthumous pardon.
The test was proposed in Turing's 1950 paper, titled Computing Machinery and Intelligence. It is an overall analysis of a machine's intelligence through it's capacity to simulate human behavior. In this instance, the chatterbots needed to convince more than 30% of the judges that they were speaking to an actual human, and not a program.
This past weekend's test took place at the Royal Society in London. Eugene and four other chatterbots engaged in a series of five minute conversations with a panel of judges. Io9 reports that Eugene convinced 1 in 3 judges that he was a non-native English speaking Ukranian boy. Eugene also took the test in 2012, but failed the Turing Test, after only managing to convince 29% of the judges panel that he was human.
Io9 points out that Eugene is "not thinking in the cognitive sense; it's a sophisticated simulator of human conversation run by scripts." Meaning that his display of intelligence is actually more a feat of programming than mechinical intelligence, and that robot overlord fans might have to wait a little longer for the supreme intelligence to come along.
