No. There are two separate things here, the Turning Test - which is not described in experimental detail, but idea is that the computer can't be distinguished from a human in a reasonably thorough test - and a prediction made by Turing in 1950 - which is NOT THE TURING TEST
The prediction was that by 2000 a computer would be able to fool human judges 30% of the time in a five minute test.
So, this did fool the human judges 30% of the time in a five minute test - but - it didn't really fit the spirit of Turing's prediction as it "cheated" much like an earlier program that pretended to be a schizophrenic patient, by pretending to be a human with poor grasp of English.
And, it wasn't a supercomputer, as some of the stories said. It was a chatbot. Have been many of those and some better at fooling humans than this one.
It's basically a media hoax that somehow got picked up by nearly all the major news outlets - shows that journalists don't have time to check their sources, and just print it as is, if the press release comes from an apparently reputable authority - in this case the University of Reading in England. I don't know why the journalists didn't bother to contact another logician, plenty of them they could have contacted, for a second opinion on the story.
This article gives a decent report of it:
No, A Computer Did Not Just Pass The Turing Test
Turing didn't specify the rules of the Turing test exactly but this is an updated version by Ray Kurzweil and Mitchell Kapor who have a wager on the outcome - gives an idea of one way you could make his ideas concrete - is a bit stronger than Turing's original test, but I think in the spirit of it - the idea of a computer that genuinely fools a human judge to think that it is human in reasonably testing conditions.
A Wager on the Turing Test: The Rules
We are a long long away from achieving that.
The prediction was that by 2000 a computer would be able to fool human judges 30% of the time in a five minute test.
So, this did fool the human judges 30% of the time in a five minute test - but - it didn't really fit the spirit of Turing's prediction as it "cheated" much like an earlier program that pretended to be a schizophrenic patient, by pretending to be a human with poor grasp of English.
And, it wasn't a supercomputer, as some of the stories said. It was a chatbot. Have been many of those and some better at fooling humans than this one.
It's basically a media hoax that somehow got picked up by nearly all the major news outlets - shows that journalists don't have time to check their sources, and just print it as is, if the press release comes from an apparently reputable authority - in this case the University of Reading in England. I don't know why the journalists didn't bother to contact another logician, plenty of them they could have contacted, for a second opinion on the story.
This article gives a decent report of it:
No, A Computer Did Not Just Pass The Turing Test
Turing didn't specify the rules of the Turing test exactly but this is an updated version by Ray Kurzweil and Mitchell Kapor who have a wager on the outcome - gives an idea of one way you could make his ideas concrete - is a bit stronger than Turing's original test, but I think in the spirit of it - the idea of a computer that genuinely fools a human judge to think that it is human in reasonably testing conditions.
A Wager on the Turing Test: The Rules
We are a long long away from achieving that.
About the Author
Robert Walker
Writer of articles on Mars and Space issues - Software Developer of Tune Smithy, Bounce Metronome etc.Studied at Wolfson College, Oxford
Lives in Isle of Mull
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