Six computer programs will try to pass themselves off as humans
this Sunday.
They will compete for the annual
Loebner
Prize, held this year at Reading University's
cybernetics
department, for a machine that passes the
Turing
Test.
The test is named after
Alan Turing, the
British mathematician and
Bletchley Park
code-breaker. Turing asked: "Can a machine think?" He believed it
was possible, but a central question was, if a computer could
think, how could we tell? Turing said if the responses from the
computer were indistinguishable from those of a human, the computer
could be said to be thinking.
Each program and its "confederate" human will respond to text
messages on any topic sent to them by other humans. If after five
minutes' chat the sender can not tell the difference between the
program and its confederate, that program is the winner.
Last year's winner, Robert
Medeksza, developed Ultra Hal, a digital secretary and
companion. According to the website, he (or she) will remind you of
appointments, keep an address and phone book and even dial numbers
for you. Hal will also run programs and recent documents on either
text or voice command. And if you are feeling lonely, Hal has huge
conversational database and
can chat about anything.