Seen the movie I-Robot, Terminator sequels,
and the likes where you have robots that are exactly like humans? This is what
we are looking at here. In a breakthrough of engineering a computer has
successfully passed the infamous ‘Turing test‘. You may have already read the
headlines about how this is the beginning of the movie Terminator and the
downfall of humanity, or if you haven’t you should because it makes for a good
read. Before we explore the implications for humanity.
What exactly is a Turing test and why do
you care?
The Turing test devised by the legendary Second
World War code breaking Alan Turing (and great forefather of modern computing) in
1950 was designed to answer the question "Can machines think?" and is
a well-known staple of artificial
intelligence studies. The test states that if
a machine is indistinguishable from a human then it is reasonable to say this
machine is thinking. In other words, in a blind test if humans can be convinced
that the machine is a human, the test succeeds.
Eugene Goostman seems like a typical
13-year-old Ukrainian boy — at least, that's what a third of judges at a Turing
Test competition this Saturday thought. Goostman says that he likes hamburgers
and candy and that his father is a gynaecologist, but it's all a lie. This boy
is a program created by computer engineers led by Russian Vladimir Veselov and
Ukrainian Eugene Demchenko.
In this instance the test, administered by
Reading University in the UK, requires over 30% of the humans in the test to be
fooled by the computer over a period of 5 minutes. A number of systems were
tested but the winner, posing as 13 year old Eugene Goostman, succeeded in
convincing 33% of the participants of its sentience. Professor Warwick of the
University of Reading added “A true Turing test does not set the topics or
questions prior to the conversations” and that “we are therefore proud to
declare that Alan Turing’s test was passed for the first time”. Professor Kevin
Warwick, a visiting professor at the university, noted in a release that
"some will claim that the Test has already been passed." He added
that "the words Turing Test have been applied to similar competitions
around the world," but "this event involved the most simultaneous
comparison tests than ever before, was independently verified and, crucially,
the conversations were unrestricted." Shortly after the announcement
headlines popped up explaining that “this is the end of the Internet as we know
it” and the beginning of the age of the Arnold Schwarzenegger clones, but there
are reasons to think that is over hyped nonsense designed to make people panic.
This is undeniably a significant announcement and features very impressive work
from the developers but this computer is a long way from becoming self-aware,
hacking all of the world’s systems and building an army of robots. Goostman
passed the test at the Turing Test 2014 competition in London on Saturday, and
the event's organizers at the University of Reading say it's the first computer
succeed.
If Skynet as we know in I-Robot (Will Smith)
is not about to launch, then what might these advances mean for us in the
shorter term? Such technology could be put to good use by cyber criminals in
developing more realistic bots. Instead of the predictable offer of 42 million
dollars from a Nigerian banker (or any of the other remarkably daft scams that
have an astoundingly high success rate) perhaps the bots could slowly build
friends and over a series of messages convince someone to click or hand over
sensitive data. This would give cyber criminals serious scalability and more
convincing scams than the one hit wonders we see today. Such convincing bots
could make automatic security filtering of spam and scams significantly more
difficult. Of course this technology could also have many helpful, legitimate
uses such as perhaps manning a customer support role. This could genuinely lead
to a place where machines take on more roles from humans, but we certainly
aren’t there yet.
In summary, this is an impressive mile
stone for a computer named Eugene Goostman who perhaps is pretending to be a 13
year old boy but you don’t need to worry about an impending apocalypse just yet.
Congratulations to the team involved.
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