Smartest AI still pretty stupid

chat with the winner
This past weekend, just over the Channel in England, the 18th annual Loebner Prize was held. That’s the contest that tries to get computers to fool humans into thinking that they are, in fact, human. Put into technical terms, this is known as the Turing Test, named after the 20th century British scientist who devised it.

According to the Times of London, Turing “predicted that by the end of the century, computers would have a 30 per cent chance of being mistaken for a human being in five minutes of text-based conversation.”

The winner, Elbot, created by Fred Roberts of Artificial Solutions in Germany, came the closest that anyone has so far. His chatbot fooled three of the 12 judges, or 25 percent. That’s just shy of the Turing threshold.