A computer program called
Elbot succeeded in fooling a
quarter of the people chatting with it into believing it was human
during last weekend's Loebner Prize competition and came close to
being the first to pass the Turing Test.
The feat won developer Fred Roberts, a former IBM and Nixdorf
software engineer who lives in Germany, £1,760 and a bronze medal
for the best machine in the 18th Loebner Prize competition held at
Reading University.
The
Loebner
Prize goes to the computer program that comes closest to
passing the Turing Test. Devised by Britain's most famous
code-breaker, Alan
Turing, the test says that if, during text-based conversation,
a machine is indistinguishable from a human, then it could be said
to be "thinking" and, therefore, could be attributed with
intelligence.
Elbot scored 25% in the test, just below the 30% pass
threshold.
The
Reading competition drew six entrants and six human
"confederates" who chatted using SMS messages with visitors. They
each held five minutes of unrestricted chat to see if the visitors
could tell which responses were from a machine.
Kevin Warwick from the University of Reading's School of Systems
Engineering, who organised the test, said, "The machines are not
yet good enough to fool all of the people all of the time, but they
are certainly fooling some of the people some of the time.
"Sunday's results show a more complex story than a straight pass
or fail by one machine. Where the machines were identified
correctly by the human interrogators, their conversational
abilities were scored at 80% and 90%.
"This shows how close machines are getting to communicating with
us in a way in which we are comfortable. That day will change our
relationship with machines."
Roberts said he developed Elbot to converse with users about any
topic under the sun, rather than a specialised and self-contained
set of FAQs as is usually the case for commercial systems.
"The completely open range of subject matter required various
new strategies to make the most of a finite knowledge base, with an
eye towards keeping the conversational experience fun, entertaining
and meaningful, though not necessarily to fool the user into
thinking the application is human," he said.
To chat with Elbot click
here.
One of the scripts from the competition will be available
soon.