Monika’s Pensieve

Alan Turing (1912-1954) was a key person in computer science. We owe him a lot, but one of the most interesting things he introduced is the Turing test. In 1950 he wrote a paper, which asked the question of whether a machine can think. Since the term “think” is so subjective, he proposed to measure it by a sort of game. You need three participants - a human judge, a computer that will chat with the judge and a human who will chat with the judge. All of these should be in isolated rooms. If the judge consistently can’t tell which of his two chat partners is a computer then the computer is intelligent.
The interesting thing is that even though this test was thought out in 1950, no computer has ever passed it. Some scientists have even argued that we should stop trying - that we should find different ways of measuring intelligence in computers.
But anyway, I’m writing this because apparently the human race has made progress - recently a computer managed to fool a whopping 3 people out of 12 in a 5 minute conversation :] The article is here - Elbot is kind of funny actually, perhaps his sarcastic wit is why he managed to convince some people he’s human:

M: What’s the capital of France?
E: I am terribly sorry. The French people do not wish for you to know their capital.