Artificial intelligence has passed the Turing test
Last week's sensational event: for the first time in the history of computing, a computer program passed the Turing test, convincing a significant number of people that it is a thinking person
Marina Astvatsaturyan, Echo of Moscow
The test proposed by the British mathematician, logician and cryptographer Alan Turing in the article "Computing Machines and the Mind" 65 years ago to assess the possibility of creating artificial intelligence was passed during a session organized in the UK by the University of Reading under the auspices of the Royal Society of London.
According to the test conditions, a person interacts with one computer and one person. Based on the answers to the questions, he must determine who he is talking to: a person or a computer program. The task of a computer program is to mislead a person into making the wrong choice. Naturally, the test participants do not see each other. In order to test the machine's intelligence, and not its ability to recognize spoken speech, the conversation is conducted in the "text only" mode, for example, using a keyboard and a screen (an intermediary computer). Correspondence should be carried out at controlled intervals so that the judge could not make conclusions based on the speed of responses. If the judge cannot say definitely which of the interlocutors is a person, and there will be at least 30% of such judges, then the test is considered passed by the computer. This had never happened before the Reading event.
In the 2014 Turing Test, the machine – a supercomputer – was represented by a 13-year-old boy Zhenya Gustman from Odessa.
This program was created in St. Petersburg, among its authors a press release from the University of Reading (Turing Test success marks milestone in computing history - VM) names Vladimir Veselov, who currently works for Amazon and lives in Virginia, as well as a Russian of Ukrainian origin, Yevgeny Demchenko.
According to the famous British cyberneticist Kevin Warwick, professor at the University of Reading and Deputy Vice-Rector for Science at Coventry University, "there is no more significant milestone in the field of artificial intelligence than the Turing Test. And taking this milestone will remain in history as one of the most inspiring," Warwick believes. Among others, New Scientist also responded to the message about the victory of the bot-Zhenya-Gustman over the live judges. His columnist Celest Biever recalled a meeting with Veselov two years ago, when the developer of the program said: "a thirteen-year-old boy is not so old to know everything, but also not so young to know nothing. In other words, he is old enough to maintain a conversation, but it is easier to imitate him than, say, Richard Dawkins or Stephen Hawking."
Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru17.06.2014