The wheels of technology keep on turning, but as it stands no computer system has beaten a real Turing test. Many have done quite well, but at least for the next few years you can be reasonably certain that I’m not a clever machine pulling a fast one.

What is a Turing test?

The Turing Test

A human judge engages in a natural language conversation with one human and one machine, each of which try to appear human; if the judge cannot reliably tell which is which, then the machine is said to pass the test. In order to test the machine’s intelligence rather than its ability to render words into audio, the conversation is limited to a text-only channel such as a computer keyboard and screen (Turing originally suggested a teletype machine, one of the few text-only communication systems available in 1950).

For anyone interested in learning more about this interesting thought experiment, point your Internet machines to Alan Turing’s scrapbook.

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