The Turing Test is the work of British mathematician Alan Turing. In 1950, in his paper, "Computing Machinery and Intelligence, " he offered a test which could be used to check if a computer is "intelligent", in the sense that humans use the term. In it, Turing substituted the question, "Can machines think? " with a more accurate one.
The principle of the test is as follows: a person communicates with 2 participants - a computer and a human. Based on the answers given, he must then decide with which one of the two he is communicating with - a machine or a real person. Until recently, there did not exist a program to have successfully passed the Turing test. But now there does.
Alan Turing himself explained that one of the most difficult things is to define thinking as a human activity. And a similar definition applied to a machine is even more difficult to explain.
The fact that there now exists a machine that can be defined as thinking ushers in a new era in the studies of artificial intelligence.
The Turing test is successfully passed if the computer fools 30% of the judges that they are communicating with a real person and not a program. The test is carried out using text messages within 5 minutes.
An interesting fact is that there are a few other machines, whose creators have claimed for them to have successfully passed the legendary test. The difference is that the conversation with them was carried out based on predetermined topics.
Eugene Gustman is the name of the program pretending to be a 13-year-old student from Odessa. It is the brainchild of 2 Russian and 1 Ukranian experts and was developed back in 2001.
After a recently executed test, the computer program managed to successfully pass the Turing test and fool the judges that it was human. The main idea of its creators is that Eugene is way too little to know everything.
The event is on one hand a phenomenal precedent, arousing the interest of millions. On the other hand however, the fact also sparks worries about the possibilities of ever quickly evolving cyber crimes.
If a machine can fool us to think that it is someone or something else, then it can pretend to be anyone whom we trust. And the consequences there are manifold.
