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Turingtest posts

A closer look at Elbot's Turing test conversation

by Darren Murph, posted Oct 19th 2008 at 7:59AM

Earlier this week, Elbot made a fairly impressive showing (comparatively speaking, at least) when fooling three judges into thinking it was human; had it fooled one more on the dozen deep panel, it would have successful passed the famed Turing test. Auntie Beeb now has a report on what exactly Elbot said when asked a litany of questions away from the competition, and there's also a video with the related experts dissecting its performance. To be totally honest, its responses weren't too far from being completely passable as ones from a tired, potentially inebriated Earthling (in our humble opinion), but we'll leave the final determination to you. Touch the read link for a one-on-one with ones and zeros.

New round of Turing test fails to crown a winner

by Donald Melanson, posted Oct 13th 2008 at 1:59PM

While some folks are considering taking the Turing test one step further and applying it to military robots, a group of researchers in the UK led by none other than would-be cyborg Kevin Warwick are doing their best to keep things as Turing intended and simply trying to fool some humans into thinking that the robot they're taking to is actually a person. Fortunately for us on the human side of the equation, they weren't quite successful, though one "robot" known as Elbot did get relatively close to the goal, fooling 25% of its human interrogators, which is just 5% off the mark set by Alan Turing. Each of the four other "artificial conversational entities" also managed to fool at least one of their questioners, though they eventually showed their true colors with random answers like "soup" when pressed as to what their job was.

Military Turing test to make autonomous war robots legal?

by Darren Murph, posted Feb 29th 2008 at 9:11AM

Not that we're experts on the matter or anything, but if barrister and engineer Chris Elliot knows a thing or two about legal issues, a kind of "military Turing test" could be the key to legally deploying autonomous systems in battle. As it stands, "weapons intrinsically incapable of distinguishing between civilian and military targets are illegal" -- at least according to Mr. Elliot -- but by testing an intelligent war machine's ability to hone in on legitimate targets and brush off friendlies, all that could change. Of course, actually administering the test still remains a mystery, but considering that remotely controlled armed bots are currently being used in Iraq, we reckon someone's already figuring out a solution to said dilemma.