The Turing Test for AI Is Far Beyond Obsolete


The “Turing Test” originally called the imitation game by Alan Turing in 1950, is a test of a machine’s ability to display intelligent behaviour that is equivalent to, or indistinguishable from a human. 

The experiment is based on Alan Turing’s question-and-answer game Can Machines Think?  The test investigates whether people can detect if they are talking to machines or humans. If the computer successfully tricks the questioner into thinking it’s a human, then it has passed Turing’s test.

The first attempt at passing the test came in the mid-1960s when a chatbot named Eliza was designed by computer programmers to mimic a psychologist.

Eugene Goostman, a computer program that simulates a 13-year-old Ukrainian boy, passed the Turing test at an event organised by Reading University’s School of Systems Engineering in partnership with RoboLaw, an EU-funded organisation examining the regulation of emerging robotic technologies.

An engineer for Google’s responsible AI organisation was dismissed following claims the company’s artificial intelligence chatbot LaMDA was a self-aware person. 

It’s becoming increasingly clear that the AI of today is outgrowing a test designed in an era when the power and sophistication of today’s computers were completely unimaginable. Maybe today’s AI truly can pass the Turing Test, but many tests and benchmarks have been proposed as a replacement with the latest proposal, called the AI Classification Framework, aiming many different types of intelligence beyond language and mathematics.

Source: Popular Mechanics

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