Gigaom AI Minute – August 9

Transcript

You're no doubt familiar with the Turing Test, put forth by Alan Turing, that posited that if a computer can ever convince you in a normal conversation that it is a human than we reached some kind of milestone. He said that this means the computer is thinking.

I always have a standard question I asked these systems when I encounter them. The question is, "What's larger a nickel or the sun?" I used to say that nothing actually answered my question correctly, but recently I did have a system do so, sort of.

There's a chat-bot named, Mitsuku, which won the Loebner Prize two times, and when I presented it the question, "What's larger a nickel or the sun?" it responded, "Well, I've not heard of a nickel, however, the sun is absolutely enormous and so it's probably bigger." I was actually pretty surprised at this, and yet I couldn't quite accept that it didn't know what a nickel was, and so I just asked it straight out, "What is a nickel?" It said, "A nickel is an American coin worth five cents."

So it feels like we may be getting to a point where a computer can answer my first question. Now the question is how long will it be before it passes the Turing Test?