ACEs ace Turing test? Errr, no.

In Tuesday's IT Blogwatch, Richi Jennings watches bots compete in the 18th Loebner Prize for Artificial Intelligence. Not to mention the importance of tasty pie in the democratic process...

Aunty's Linda Serck reports, from your humble blogwatcher's alma mater:

The Turing Test is something I've been interested in since my university days - the whole question about whether computers can one day be programmed to think and interact conversationally like a human being ... So when the opportunity arose to judge in such an event at Reading university, which hosted the 18th Loebner Prize for Artificial Intelligence, I went along to see how far computers have come.
...
Alan Turing is considered to be the founder of computer science. During the Second World War Turing worked at Bletchley Park, the UK's code-breaking centre ... In 1950 he proposed a test of a machine's ability to demonstrate intelligence ... If a computer acts indistinguishably from a human in a speech-based chat environment, then we can argue the machine is thinking.
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In short it was an interesting experiment but ultimately there's no contest - in my view computers simply can't compete with natural flowing human conversation.

Aharon Etengoff sounds off:

Six artificial conversational entities (ACEs) have failed to fool interrogators into thinking they were human during a real-time chat. Although all the ACEs passed themselves off as human to at least one individual, the programs did not manage to convince 30 per cent of the participants, thereby failing the famous 1950 threshold set by Alan Turing.

Indeed, the winning machine, known as Elbot, only achieved a 25 percent success rate.

Bobbie Johnson is the Grauniad's technology correspondent:

[Elbot's] success rate at convincing the judges that it was actually human ... [was] not enough to please the ghost of Turing, but it was enough to pick up Elbot's owner, Fred Roberts, a cash prize.

Fred's invention had a few tricks up his sleeve, including trying to the judges off their game by explicitly referring to itself as a machine ... The University of Reading, which hosted the event, is spinning the result as a "nearly there" moment - whether or not you agree is quite a different matter - but it certainly seems the singularity is still a way off.

Nick Carr:

Five machines competed in today's finals, and each of them managed to convince at least one person that it was human. All the robots, moreover, received strikingly high scores for their conversational skills.
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Here's how Elbot opened a conversation with one of its human interrogators:

Judge: "Hi. How's it going?"
Elbot: "I feel terrible today. This morning I made a mistake and poured milk over my breakfast instead of oil, and it rusted before I could eat it."

Hah! The old robot-pretending-to-be-a-person-pretending-to-be-a-robot ruse.

Luciano Floridi is "one of Italy's most influential thinkers":

Independently of whether Turing might have been pleased (he was not well treated in this country, recall?), there was a satisfying sense of “coming home” of the Turing Test.
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Having been invited to play the role of a judge ... I enjoyed the opportunity to see from close-up the machinery ... [But] it was sufficient to reassure me that our machines are not even close to resembling anything that might be open-mindedly called intelligent ... [even though] some of the judges were asking useless questions like “are you a computer?”. This means having missed two essential points of the whole exercise.
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The Loebner Prize should be re-thought more like a chess tournament, where we could play imitation games with different levels of time control ... after half a century of failures and zero progress, some serious reconsideration of the actual feasibility of true AI is a must, and making things immensely more difficult cannot help.

Andy Somerfield cuts to the chase:

Were the testers pre-screened? Maybe the test is really showing that 25% of the population is just dumb.

And finally...

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Richi Jennings is an independent analyst/adviser/consultant, specializing in blogging, email, and spam. A 23 year, cross-functional IT veteran, he is also an analyst at Ferris Research. You can follow him on Twitter, pretend to be Richi's friend on Facebook, or just use boring old email: blogwatch@richi.co.uk.

Previously in IT Blogwatch:

• New Apple MacBooks on Tuesday: ooh and aah time again
• EXTRA: Wi-Fi encryption not safe? PANIC!
• The sky is falling: recession warning sounded