ElBot

http://newsvote.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/7670050.stm

No computer has ever passed the Turing Test to see if, during text-based conversation, a machine can be indistinguishable from a person. But Elbot just came pretty close.

At the 18th Loebner Prize for artificial intelligence, held at the weekend, this artificial intelligence entity convinced four of the 12 human interrogators he was indistinguishable from them.

If Elbot had convinced one other, it would have passed the magic 30% mark - the threshold set by Britain's most famous code-breaker, Alan Turing, who devised the test back in 1950.

However...

Human: If I have a jewellery box in my hand, how many CDs can I store in it?"

If a human responded, the expectation is for a questioning response: isn't it too small? Is it a real jewellery box, in which case how big is it? Did you really mean to ask that?

Elbot: I think I would have to perform an autopsy on you to find that out

(Claification, that middle sentence is what the human is thinking, not what he asked)

Thought this wd be 200 posts of Marcello ranting about Guy Garvey tbh.

it's not such a crazy answer, perhaps the bot was trying to be a wise guy to an otherwise vague question?

"I think I would have to perform an autopsy on you to find that out"
"What are you, some kinda wise guy?"
"Say bud, don't get sore"

Actually it sounds like a misplaced but really sinister threat.

Is the bot Frasier Crane?

Somebody ask if he's a benny tied to a tree...

he said

"Ah nature! The smell of unrefined iron ore. Crude oil lapping against my toes. I love it. "

What is this, another Laura Barton column?

It was the time when the iron ore seeped over my minute toes as I immersed myself in a sewage pit at Dungeness the other evening when I realised how Iron & Wine's boats succumb to winsome travellers such as I. "Look at the boats, the boats they are of iron," his voice floats, and I close my Borges anthology as the Proustian oil invades my nostril, thinking again of those boats, looking at the boats, those boats they are of iron etc.

Isn't 4/12 > 30%, though?

I win

One difficulty with the Turing test, as it has been conducted during Loebner Prize competitions, is that many of the human testers seem to interpret answers that are wild non-sequitors as 'human-like', if the answer 1) has some vague, marginal relation to the question and 2) could be interpreted as an attempt at humor. Such 'offbeat' answers are far easier to form programatically than reasonable answers would be.

Because of this tendency, certain really simple, very stupid programs sometimes 'pass' as human during the Loebner competition, which would easily be outed as machines under a more rigorous set of rules, or a more skeptical set of testers.

i'm kinda sceptical that anyone who would judge elbot as human could pass the turing test themselves.

I think I would have to perform an autopsy on you to find that out.

http://www.elbot.com/

q: is it okay to play bass through a guitar amp?

elbot: This is confusing. Why bring magazines into this?

did more than 30% of us think Captain Lorax was real?

Real? Who knows? But obv written by a human and not a computer program.