Computer passes Turing Test for the first time

A computer programme has, for the first time, successfully fooled judges at a Turing Test competition into thinking it was a 13-year-old Ukranian boy named Eugene Goostman, The Verge reports.

Goostman said he liked hamburgers and candy and that his father was a gynaecologist, but it was all a lie. The boy, actually a programme created by computer engineers led by Russian Vladimir Veselov and Ukrainian Eugene Demchenko, convinced a third of judges that he was a human which, according to commentators, was significant.

The famous Turing Test, created by legendary computer scientist Alan Turing in 1950, had long been used to test whether machines could actually think and had been a well-known staple of artificial intelligence studies.

Goostman passed the test at the Turing Test 2014 competition in London on Saturday and, according to the event's organisers at the University of Reading, it was the first computer to succeed. Professor Kevin Warwick, a visiting professor at the university, noted in a release that "some will claim that the Test has already been passed."

He added, "the words Turing Test have been applied to similar competitions around the world," but "this event involved the most simultaneous comparison tests than ever before, was independently verified and, crucially, the conversations were unrestricted."

The programme had nearly passed the test in 2012, with 29 per cent of judges at another completion deciding that it was a human.

Despite the achievement, the results remained far from conclusive and did not mean that the machines were taking over the world, no matter what one might read on the internet.

The test involved five machines at the Royal Society in central London to see if they could fool people into thinking they were humans during text-based conversations.

The University of Reading said no computer had previously passed the Turing Test, which required 30 per cent of human interrogators to be duped during a series of five-minute keyboard conversations.

Goostman developed to simulate a 13-year-old boy, managed to convince 33 per cent of the judges that it was human, according to the university.

The successful machine was the work of Russian-born Vladimir Veselov, who lives in the US, and Ukrainian Eugene Demchenko who lives in Russia.

Veselov said it was a remarkable achievement for them and they hoped it boosted the interest in artificial intelligence and chatbots, The Telegraph reported.

(Also see: 60 years after suicide, British mathematician Alan Turing gets Royal Pardon)