- What is a Turing test?
And can you even pass this test?
Don't worry.
The Turing test is more about testing a machine
than testing you.
But you can worry when the machines
always pass the Turing Test.
(electronic warbling)
Hey, Glitchers, welcome back to Glitch,
your easy insights into bots, big data,
and artificial intelligence.
Today, we're talking about the Turing test.
It's a test for artificial intelligence.
Not the questions online that asks you
if you are human.
In fact, it's questions that we ask a machine,
because it's the test of all tests,
meant to define exactly that moment
when a machine truly becomes intelligent,
or at least, when it's intelligent enough to fool a human.
And while the idea of artificial intelligence seems new,
the Turing test is really old.
So the Turing test was proposed by Alan Turing in 1950.
Yes, that British computer scientist.
He wrote a paper called Computing Machinery and Intelligence
but he originally called this test the Imitation Game.
He proposed it as a solution to settle the issue
of a machine intelligence.
The test proposed that a human evaluator
would evaluate conversations between itself and a computer,
and itself and a human.
The evaluator knows that one of the conversations
might not be with a human, but he or she doesn't know
who the human or who the robot would be.
They would have to judge by the conversation
which it believes to be human
and which it believes to be a machine.
But like any test, there are rules.
First, the conversation would happen in a text-only channel,
like a computer keyboard and screen,
so that the evaluator isn't judging how realistic
the robot looks.
(crickets chirping)
Second, if the evaluator cannot reliably tell
one from the other,
the winner goes to the machine.
The third rule,
the test is not about if the machine
gives the right answers to questions,
but rather if their answers resemble
the type of answers you'd have in a human conversation.
In 1950, Turing predicted that in 49 years, the year 2000,
machines with 100 megabytes of memory
would be able to easily pass this test.
What happened?
The Loebner Prize was established
to do a similar type of test to the Turing test,
and it was established in 1990.
How have the machines done since 1990?
Well, the results are mixed.
Not many have actually passed the Turing test,
but those who have passed the Turing test
have done it more so than from clever tactics
than being highly intelligent.
The first bot to have passed it in 1996
was a bot named Eliza.
This bot tries to mimic a psychotherapist's tactics,
where it is empathetic but passive,
asking leading questions like, "But how do you feel?"
It was a very clever tactic that actually fooled the judges.
One of the most recent winners
was a bot named Eugene Goostman.
It was a bot that was given the persona
of 13-year-old Ukrainian boy that fooled the judges,
and any time the conversation went off-topic,
the judges likely attributed it
to language and cultural barriers.
Alan Turing thought the Turing test
would be the signaling moment
and the perfect test to identify if machines can think.
We were able to pass the Turing test
without having thinking machines,
you know, the kind of machines that take over the world.
But already through the Turing test,
we've realized that we're fooling the hell out of humans.
We're all kind of living in a constant Turing test.
I mean, when you're online,
are you talking to tech support or are you talking to a bot?
Google announced that it had fooled restaurants
into believing that someone was calling in
to make a reservation.
Listen to this.
(phone ringing)
- [Restaurant] Hi, may I help you?
- [Google] Hi, I'd like to reserve a table
for Wednesday, the 7th.
- [Restaurant] For seven people?
- [Google] Um, it's for four people.
- [Restaurant] Four people? When?
Today? Tonight?
- [Google] Next Wednesday at 6:00 p.m.
- And it's not just that.
Even people on dating sites are fooled into thinking
that a human is interested in them.
This happened multiple times on the platform Ashley Madison.
We've passed the Turing test,
but we don't yet have sentient machines.
So how do we know when we have sentient thinking machines?
Comment down below and tell me your ideas of
what type of Turing test you would propose
that would actually test if we have a sentient machine,
a type of Turing test 2.0?
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Thanks so much for joining in.
(electronic warbling)
(futuristic music)