OSAKA ¨C Last month a callow youth with the unprepossessing name of Eugene Goostman made a landmark achievement in the august surroundings of the Royal Society, the world¡¯s oldest scientific academy: He was able to convince the judges for a third of the time that he was a 13-year old Ukrainian boy and not the ¡°chatbot¡± that he really is.
In so doing, ¡°Goostman¡± passed the Turing test, named after mathematician Alan Turing in his 1950 paper ¡°Computing Machinery and Intelligence.¡±
British organizers of the competition were overexcited at young Goostman¡¯s achievement. It is proving to be an interesting landmark year for robots, perhaps less so for humans.
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