How Can You Tell a Machine?

this is a post on "Turing test" from the (Discovermagazine.com)

How Can You Tell If Your IM Buddy Is Really a Machine?

Hint: Ask it about Sarah Palin.

by Melissa Lafsky

published online March 23, 2009

Computer screen at the 2008 Loebner Prize

Image courtesy of Kevin Warwick

Once a year, a group of computer scientists and technology mavens gather at the Loebner Prize Competition to test the continuing evolution of artificial intelligence. The contest is a real-world rendition of the famous "Turing test" dreamed up by computer science luminary Alan Turing in the 1950s: A human engages in an electronic conversation with another human and a machine simultaneously. If the judge can't tell the person from the computer, then the machine passes.

The annual winner of the competition walks away with a $2,000 prize and a bronze medal. The Grand Prize of $100,000 and a Gold Medal has never been awarded, and remains reserved for the first computer whose responses are fully indistinguishable from a human's—the first computer that can truly "think" (at least, per Turing's definition).

Last year's judges—a group of journalists, computer scientists, philosophy professors, and other academics—each sat at a computer screen split down the middle, with one chat on each side. The judges were told that one of the chats was with a bot, while the other was with a human.

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