Testing Turing's five minutes, parallel‐paired imitation game
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to consider Turing's two tests for machine intelligence: the parallel‐paired, three‐participants game presented in his 1950 paper, and the “jury‐service” one‐to‐one measure described two years later in a radio broadcast. Both versions were instantiated in practical Turing tests during the 18th Loebner Prize for artificial intelligence hosted at the University of Reading, UK, in October 2008. This involved jury‐service tests in the preliminary phase and parallel‐paired in the final phase.
Design/methodology/approach
Almost 100 test results from the final have been evaluated and this paper reports some intriguing nuances which arose as a result of the unique contest.
Findings
In the 2008 competition, Turing's 30 per cent pass rate is not achieved by any machine in the parallel‐paired tests but Turing's modified prediction: “at least in a hundred years time” is remembered.
Originality/value
The paper presents actual responses from “modern Elizas” to human interrogators during contest dialogues that show considerable improvement in artificial conversational entities (ACE). Unlike their ancestor – Weizenbaum's natural language understanding system – ACE are now able to recall, share information and disclose personal interests.
Keywords
Citation
Shah, H. and Warwick, K. (2010), "Testing Turing's five minutes, parallel‐paired imitation game", Kybernetes, Vol. 39 No. 3, pp. 449-465. https://doi.org/10.1108/03684921011036178
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2010, Emerald Group Publishing Limited