Alan
Turing, the man responsible for cracking the German Enigma code also
created a test for machines that could think and act like humans.
Recently in Guwahati, India at the Techniche Computer Festival,
Cleverbot successfully fooled 59.3% of 1,334 voters thinking it was
human. The amount of participants was far greater than any other
previous Turing Test. The creator of this robot is Rollo Carpenter.
He said that, “You could argue that by
fooling more than 50 per cent of the people, Cleverbot has passed a
Turing test. But there is no universal test.”
The
way the test was conducted was that the robot was tested alongside
humans, for 'control' purposes. Thirty volunteers directed a short
typed conversations with an online chatter. This chatter could either
be a real person or Cleverbot. These conversations were then
projected onto a big screen for the audience to vote wether it was
the robot or a human. It's crazy to think that a machine is capable
of imitating humans so closely and what a couple years of technology
will bring. And as silly as it sounds it seems quite possible that
machines could one day supersede
humans.
Even
though Cleverbot passed the test, it is still an endless debate.
Carpenter also stated that “ You could argue that it failed because
to truly 'pass', it should be indistinguishable from a human, and it
wasn't. Even in 1997, Jabberwacky, a robot succeeded in fooling more
than half of the audience but the human chatter were considerably
more human.
1 comment:
I think the significance of the result of the Cleverbot test is that the difference between the percentage of people who thought Cleverbot was a human being and the real human-to-human conversation was with a real person is very small; it is only 4 percent difference. To be honest, fooling 59.3 percent of people is not very impressive, but the fact that those people even thought a real human being was a machine tells that the Cleverbot was not very different from real person. It would have been interesting if they had voted between the Cleverbot and the human being for who would be a real person, because that would show more effectively how many people were fooled by the Cleverbot.
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