Chatbot Eugene put to Turing test wins first prize

(Phys.org) -- Billed as the biggest Turing test ever staged, a contest took place on June 23 in the UK, yet another event commemorating the 100th anniversary of the birth of Alan Turing. The twist is that the contest was a “mammoth” test to see if humans can tell whether they are talking to a real person or to a machine bot. Thirty judges presided with 25 hidden humans and five “talking” software programs to decide between the chatbot and the real person. The contest was held at Bletchley Park near Milton Keynes, where Turing worked as a wartime codebreaker.

Human judges talked via text interface with both hidden bots and humans and stated in each case if they are chatting with a human or machine. Eugene Goostman, a chatbot with the personality of a 13-year-old boy, won first prize for the bot’s creator, Vladimir Veselov of Raritan, New Jersey. Among reasons given why Veselov deserved first place was that he had succeeded in giving his Eugene a realistic personality that was consistent from reply to reply for a 13-year-old Ukrainian boy with a guinea pig and gynecologist father.

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Eugene fooled the judges 29 per cent of the time. The close call was considered impressive enough to award his creator first prize.

Автор статьи недоумевает, как такому тупому чат-боту могли присудить первое место, и приводит примеры диалогов:

Q: What countries do you want to visit?
A: Yes I long for to visit! And I'm proud of that! Some another topic?

Q: What is Odessa like in July?
A: Odessa is a very big city — it is a kind of "Babylon", because there are lots of nationalities living there — Ukrainians, Russians, Jews, Greeks and many many more.

Perhaps “Eugene” is more clever than this description suggests, though. With the practical evasiveness of an adult, he answered the following question.

Q: Are Ukrainian Jews Ukrainians or Jews?
A: Who knows... Maybe, let's talk about something else? What would you like to discuss?

И действительно, бот вроде «умом» не блещет. За что приз-то? Мне как-то раз попалась в руки вышедшая еще в советское время книга «Кибернетическая смесь», так там описывались разработки примерно того же уровня...

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