Was Turing Test Legitimately Beaten, Or Just Cleverly Tricked?

beaker_72 (1845996) writes "On Sunday we saw a story that the Turing Test had finally been passed. The same story was picked up by most of the mainstream media and reported all over the place over the weekend and yesterday. However, today we see an article in TechDirt telling us that in fact the original press release was just a load of hype. So who's right? Have researchers at a well established university managed to beat this test for the first time, or should we believe TechDirt who have pointed out some aspects of the story which, if true, are pretty damning?" Kevin Warwick gives the bot a thumbs up, but the TechDirt piece takes heavy issue with Warwick himself on this front.

Stupidly tricked, not clever

[gurps_npc]

Turnign test is NOT supposed to be limited to 15 minutes, nor is it supposed to be conducted by someone that does not understand the main language claimed to be used by the computer.

Similarly, the computer must convince the judge it is a human with it's full mental capacity, not child, nor a mentally defective person, nor someone in a coma.

The test is whether a computer can, in an extended conversation, fool a competent human into thinking it is a competent human being speaking the same language,at least 50% of the time.

Program pretends to be foreign child, not adult

[dunkindave]

For those who haven't read the article (I read one yesterday and assume the details are the the same): The program claimed to be a Ukrainian boy of 13 years old, a non-native English speaker, writing in English to English speakers. This allowed the program to avoid the problem of people using language to make judgements about whether the responses were from a person or a program. Also, since the program was claiming to be a boy instead of an adult, it also greatly reduced what could be expected of the responses, again greatly simplifying the programs parameters and reducing what the testers could use to test. So basically, the Turing Test is supposed to be a test if a person can tell if the program acts like a person, but here the test was rewritten to see if the program acted like a child from a different culture and who was supposed not to be speaking in his native language. Many are apparently crying foul.

I personally agree.

The Turing test

[KramberryKoncerto]

... was not actually performed in the research. End of story.