On June 23rd, the 100th anniversary of the birth of Alan Turing, a contest at Bletchley Park, where Turing was key in cracking the Nazi Enigma code during World War II, saw Eugene Goostman win the biggest Turing test ever staged.

Except Eugene is not a person, it is a chatbot with the 'personality' of a 13-year-old boy in the Ukraine.

The Turing test is what Turing considered a threshold for believability, an evaluation of machine intelligence; a machine that fooled humans into thinking it was human 30 per cent of the time will have beaten the test. 


Credit: http://www.princetonai.com/bot/bot.jsp. Link: New Scientist

How hard was this test? It involved over 150 separate conversations, 30 judges, 25 hidden humans and five elite, chattering software programs. 

 How did Eugene do? It fooled the judges 29 per cent of the time.

Bot with boyish personality wins biggest Turing test by Celeste Biever, New Scientist