AI wins bronze Turing Award

British mathematician Alan Turing, if not the father of artificial intelligence, can at the very least be considered the father of methods of understanding and discerning if a machine is in fact capable of artificial intelligence. Turing came up with a subjective but simple rule for determining whether machines were capable of thought. Writing in 1950, Turing argued that conversation was proof of intelligence. If a computer talked like a human, then for all practical purposes it thought like a human too. His tests, and by extension, the yearly competitions that have been ongoing since 1991, consists of a subjective but simple rule for determining whether machines were capable of thought. Turing's test consists of a human judge who would swap messages simultaneously with a computer and another human, without being told which was which. If the judge had trouble telling his correspondents apart, Turing said, then the computer met the human standard of intelligence. This year's Bronze award (no software has yet won the silver or gold awards) handed out by organizer American scientist and philanthropist Hugh Loebner goes to the piece of software that best mimics human conversation in text form. That software was a "chatbot" called Elbot designed by Fred Roberts a Hamburg, Germany-based consultant. Elbot duping three out of 12 judges assigned to evaluate it.

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