Artificial intelligence 'Eugene' passes Turing Test

The 65 year-old Turing Test was passed for the first time by supercomputer Eugene Goostman during Turing Test 2014 held at the Royal Society in London on Saturday June 7, 2014.

‘Eugene’, a computer programme that simulates a 13 year old boy, was developed in Saint Petersburg, Russia. The development team includes Eugene’s creator Vladimir Veselov, and Eugene Demchenko.

The Turing Test is based on 20^th century mathematician and code-breaker Turing’s 1950 question and answer game, ‘Can Machines Think?’ The experiment investigates whether people can detect if they are talking to machines or humans.

If a computer is mistaken for a human more than 30 per cent of the time during a series of five minute keyboard conversations it passes the test. Up until now no computer has achieved this. Eugene managed to convince 33 per cent of the human judges that it was human.

This event was organised by the University’s School of Systems Engineering in partnership with RoboLaw, an EU-funded organisation examining the regulation of emerging robotic technologies.