In 1950, the mathematician Alan Turing came up with an elegant way of testing a computer’s ability to “act” like a human. If machines could truly “think,” they would surely be able to communicate in such a way that humans wouldn’t know they were interacting with a computer.
The Turing Test was born. Then in 1991, researchers and technologists turned Turing’s thought-experiment into an actual competition: The Loebner Prize.The goal is to trick human judges into believing they’re chatting (via text) with an actual human.
So Discover Magazine decided to arrange a conversation between of the world’s top-ranked computer chatbots, ALICE and Jabberwacky. Continue reading