The Real Turing Test

We've heard of the famous Turing Test -- in which Artificial Intelligence is sort of defined by the inability of a neutral observer to distinguish, via typed messages, between a computer and a machine -- well, not quite...

The actual Turing Test proposed by Alan Turing in his book "Minds and Machines" published in the 50s is a little more clever than that. Turing devised a little trick to sort of level the playing field, as it were. The observers were to discriminate between a real MAN pretending to be a woman and a MACHINE pretending to be a woman. The device of making the man pretend, Turing thought, would make the game more,... interesting. Turing, you may recall, was gay.

However, even though Turing proposed this test as a way of telling whether a computer program possessed intelligence, the test was never actually carried out in his day. Machines were far too simple then for the test to be very interesting. The test was really only a "thought experiment" intended to define a very ambiguous goal (Artificial Intelligence) in a somewhat less ambiguous way (The Test.)

Well, the art of Artificial Intelligence has grown over the years, and this spring it wa finally time to run the test -- for the first time in history -- against a particular computer program constructed just for this purpose. Someone actually set up a Real Turing Test facing off hordes of neutral observers (via the web, a tool not available to Turing) against a relatively modern woman-simulating program named ALICE and measured the results.

Read all about it here.