Turing test

Eugene Goostman is an artificial intelligence chatterbot. First developed by a group of three programmers; the Russian-born Vladimir Veselov, Ukranian-born Eugene Demchenko, and Russian-born Sergey Ulasen in Saint Petersburg in 2001,^[1][2] Goostman is portrayed as a 13-year old Ukranian boy in an effort to make his personality and knowledge level believable to users.

Goostman has competed in a number of Turing test contests since its creation, with several second-place finishes in the Loebner Prize. In June 2012, at a competition marking what would have been the 100th birthday of its namesake, Goostman won what was promoted as the largest-ever Turing test contest, successfully convincing 29% of its judges that it was human. On 7 June 2014, at a contest marking the 60th anniversary of Turing’s death, Goostman became, according to Kevin Warwick, the first ever computer to pass the Turing test, by convincing 33% of judges that it was human.

Personality

Eugene Goostman is portrayed as being a 13 year-old boy from Odessa, Ukraine, with a father who works as a gynaecologist, and a pet guinea pig. Veselov stated that Goostman was designed to be a “character with a believable personality”; the choice of age was intentional, as one who is thirteen is, in Veselov’s opinion, “not too old to know everything and not too young to know nothing”. His young age also provides forgiveness for minor grammatical errors in his responses.^[1][3] In 2014, work was made on improving the bot’s “dialog controller”, allowing Goostman to output more human-like dialogue.^[2]

Accolades

Eugune Goostman competed in a number of Turing test competitions; it finished as the runner-up in the 2001, 2005, and 2008 Loebner Prize competitions. On 23 June 2012, Goostman won a Turing test competition at Bletchley Park in Milton Keynes, held to mark the centenary of Alan Turing. The competition, which featured five bots, twenty-five hidden humans, and thirty judges, was considered to be the largest-ever Turing test contest by its organizers. After a series of five minute-long text conversations, 29% of the judges were convinced that the bot was an actual human—only one percent away from the 30% goal suggested by Turing in his paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence.^[3]

Turing test pass

On 7 June 2014, in a Turing test competition at the Royal Society, organized by Kevin Warwick of the University of Reading to mark the 60th anniversary of Turing’s death, Goostman was named the first ever computer to pass a Turing test. 33% of the judges (which included John Sharkey, a sponsor of the bill granting a posthumous pardon to Turing, and Red Dwarf actor Robert Llewellyn) were convinced that Eugene Goostman was a human.^[4][2]

In response to the achievement, Warwick stated that “some will claim that the Test has already been passed. The words Turing Test have been applied to similar competitions around the world. However this event involved the most simultaneous comparison tests than ever before, was independently verified and, crucially, the conversations were unrestricted. A true Turing Test does not set the questions or topics prior to the conversations. We are therefore proud to declare that Alan Turing’s Test was passed for the first time on Saturday.”^[2]