A chatterbot named Eugene Goostman has become the first to pass the Turing Test.
“Eugene” and four other contenders participated in the Turing Test 2014 Competition at the Royal Society in London. Each chatterbox was required to engage in a series of five-minute text-based conversations with a panel of judges. A computer passes the test if it is mistaken for a human more than 30% of the time. Eugene convinced 33% of the judges it was human– the only machine in history to do so.
The competition was held on the 60th anniversary of the death of Alan Turing, the great British mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst , computer scientist and philosopher.
During World War II, Turing worked for the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) at Bletchley Park, Britain’s code breaking center. He led Hut 8, the section responsible for German naval cryptanalysis. He devised a number of techniques for breaking German ciphers, and improved the pre-war Polish bombe method, an electromechanical machine that could find settings for the Enigma machine.
After the war, he worked at the National Physical Laboratory, where he designed the ACE, among the first designs for a stored-program computer.
The great Alan Turing was highly influential in the development of computer science, providing a formalization of the concepts of “algorithm” and “computation”. Turing is widely considered the “father” of theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence.
The shameful British government prosecuted Turing for being gay, showing no respect for a man whose contributions to Britain and the world were enormous. He accepted treatment with estrogen injections (chemical castration) as an alternative to prison, and later committed suicide.