Computers fool people into believing they are human

As part of the 18th Loebner Prize, all of the artificial conversational entities (ACEs) competing to pass the Turing Test managed to fool at least one of their human interrogators that they were in fact communicating with a person, rather than a machine. One of the ACEs, the eventual winner of the 2008 Loebner Prize, got even closer to the 30% Turing Test threshold set by 20th-century British mathematician Alan Turing in 1950, by fooling 25% of its human interrogators. Top machines from around the world were entered into the competition and, following extensive scrutiny, these were whittled down to the five best for the 12 October finale. Organiser of the Turing Test, Professor Kevin Warwick from the University of Reading’s School of Systems Engineering, says: “This has been a very exciting day, with two of the machines getting very close to passing the Turing Test for the first time. “We wanted to raise the bar in artificial intelligence and, although the machines aren’t yet good enough to fool all of the people all of the time, they are certainly at the stage of fooling some of the people some of the time.” The program Elbot, created by Fred Roberts, was named best machine in the 18th Loebner Prize competition and was awarded $3,000 by competition sponsor Hugh Loebner.