Man or Computer? Can You Tell the Difference?
It’s not every day you have to persuade a panel of scientists that you’re human. But this was the position I found myself in at the Loebner Prize competition, an annual Turing test, in which artificial intelligence programs attempt to pass themselves off as people.
The British mathematician Alan Turing probed one of computing’s biggest theoretical questions: Could machines possess a mind? If so, how would we know? In 1950, he proposed an experiment: If judges in typed conversations with a person and a computer program couldn’t tell them apart, we’d come to consider the machine as “thinking.” He predicted that programs would be capable of fooling judges 30 percent of the time by the year 2000.
They came closest at the 2008 Loebner Prize competition when the top chatbot (as a human-mimicking program is called) fooled 3 of 12 judges, or 25 percent. I took part in the next year’s test while doing research for a book on how artificial intelligence is reshaping our ideas about human intelligence.