blog.kennypearce.net

"I'm human. Really, I am!"

It seems that Jason Striegel (HT: slashdot) has fallen into an existential quandary after repeatedly failing the Turing Test in AIM conversations. The Turing test, named for mathematician and proto-computer scientist Dr. Alan Turing, refers to the experiment of interacting with an individual and attempting to determine whether that individual is a human or a computer. Many years of research have gone into the attempt to create artificial intelligences that pass the Turing test, but never before have I heard of a human who failed it. Poor guy. Even Eliza, a psycho-analyst program which was probably the first artificial intelligence (if it can be called that) to be claimed to have passed the Turing test, seems to think he's a bot. Who knows? Maybe he is. After all, the picture on his profile sure looks like a robot to me!