Next sunday there will be a fun little challenge happing at the University of Reading. Several computer programs will be competing to pass the ‘Turing test’.
To explain it simply, the Turing test, is an experiment to test a computers intelligence by having it attempt to fool a human into believeing it is human as well. A human judge faces off against a computer program and a human pretending to be the same program simultaneously. If the judge cannot tell which conversation is the human and which is the program, the program will have passed the Turing test.
Some people will definitely argue that the program doesn’t understand what it is saying, it is simply following rules to respond to the questions posed to it, and it does not represent intelligence. Well, don’t you as a human really just do the same thing, but with a considerably more complex and dynamic ruleset?
If the example conversation in this article is representative of all the programs competeing then they have a long way to go before they fool a human.