Is artificial intelligence here?

Posted by LauraDerb on December 19th, 2020

I, Eugene Goostman

The idea of ​​artificial intelligence and the hopes and fears that are associated with its emergence are quite prevalent in our common subconscious. Whether we imagine Judgment Day at the hands of Skynet or egalitarian totalitarianism at the hands of V.I.K.I and his army of robots, the results are the same: the equivocal displacement of humans as the dominant life forms on the planet.

Some might call it the fears of a technophobic mind, others a meek prophecy. And if the recent findings at the University of Reading (UK) are any indication, we may have already begun to fulfill that prophecy. In early June 2014, a landmark achievement was allegedly achieved: the passing of the eternal Turing Test by a computer program. Being acclaimed and ridiculed around the world for being the birth of artificial intelligence or an intelligent trickster robot that only demonstrated technical prowess respectively, the show known as Eugene Goostman may soon become a name embedded in artificial intelligence banking.

The program or Eugene (for your friends) was originally created in 2001 by Vladimir Veselov from Russia and Eugene Demchenko from Ukraine. It has since been developed to simulate the personality and conversation patterns of a 13-year-old boy and competed against four other shows to emerge victorious. The Turing test was conducted at the world famous Royal Society in London and is considered the most comprehensive design test in history. The requirements for a computer program to pass the Turing Test are simple but difficult: the ability to convince a human that the entity it is conversing with is another human being at least 30 percent of the time.

The result in London earned Eugene a 33 percent success rating, making it the first program to pass the Turing Test. The test itself was more challenging because it involved 300 conversations, with 30 judges or human subjects, against 5 other computer programs in simultaneous conversations between humans and machines, in five parallel tests. In all cases, only Eugene was able to convince 33 percent of the human judges that he was a human child. Built with algorithms that support "conversational logic" and open topics, Eugene opened up an entirely new reality of intelligent machines capable of fooling humans.

With implications in the fields of artificial intelligence, cybercrime, philosophy and metaphysics, it is humbling to know that Eugene is only version 1.0 and its creators are already working on something more sophisticated and advanced.