Chatbot Eugene Goostman, the creation of Vladimir Veselov who endowed his machine with the personality of a 13-year old boy, was awarded 1st Prize at a Turing Test  event held on June 23rd 2012, the 100th Anniversary of Alan Turing's birth.

Alan Turing proposed the idea for "The Imitation Game", which we now refer to as the Turing Test, in 1950.

He dreamed up the idea to address the question "Can machines think?" and the details are in the paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence published in the journal, Mind.

Turing proposed that a machine that could convince human judges that they were conversing with another human 30% of the time would "win" his test - and so far no machine has won.

The event that was staged at Bletchley Park, where Alan Turing worked as a codebreaker during World War II, on the date of the 100th anniversary of his birth was the biggest ever Turing Test with 30 judges "listening" - that is, exchanging typed messages - with 30 unseen others -  25 humans and five software "chatbot" programs. 

(Click to read chat)

Despite being awarded the Colonnade Trophy for coming first, Veselov's chatbot Eugene Goostman only convinced judges 29% of the time and so still falls short of "passing" the Turing Test. 

Eugene Asked why he had given his creation the personality of a 13-year old Ukranian, Veselov explains:

"13 years old is not too old to know everything and not too young to know nothing."

If you want to try a conversation with Eugene, dubbed "The Weirdest Creature in the World" you can do so online. 

Four or the five of the programmers participating in the contest were former winners of the annual Loebner Prize Contest (LPC) and its winner, Vladimir Veselov, had been LPC runner-up three times. In a close second place, came Robby Garner with JFred, and third place went to Rollo Carpenter's Cleverbot.

More Information

Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Turing A.M., (1950) Mind Vol 59, pp443-460

Interact with Eugene Goostman

JFred

Cleverbot

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