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Bot With Boyish Personality Wins Biggest Turing Test


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Eugene Goostman

Eugene Goostman, a chatbot with the personality of a 13-year-old boy, won the biggest Turing test ever staged, on 23 June, the 100th anniversary of the birth of Alan Turing.

Credit: New Scientist

The chatbot Eugene Goostman fooled Turing test judges 29 percent of the time into thinking it was human to take first place in the recent contest in the United Kingdom.

The event marked the 100th anniversary of the birth of Alan Turing, who said that a machine that fooled humans 30 percent of the time would have beaten the test.

Eugene creator Vladimir Veselov says the results were more statistically significant than previous Turing tests because it was the biggest contest. Thirty human judges had more than 150 separate conversations via a text interface with 25 hidden humans and five software programs. The judges had to determine whether they were chatting with a human or a machine. Typical tests involve just four humans and four machines.

Robby Garner's JFred took second place and Rollo Carpenter's Cleverbot took third. Several bots put sentences together by imitating people they had spoken to before or by searching through Twitter transcripts for conversation ideas, but Veselov created Eugene with the specific personality of a 13-year-old boy. "He has created very much a person where Cleverbot is everybody," Carpenter says.

From New Scientist 
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Abstracts Copyright © 2012 Information Inc. External Link, Bethesda, Maryland, USA


 

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