Ukrainian 13-year-old Eugene Goostman lives in Odessa, has a guinea pig, and is a fan of computers. Although he looks like an ordinary boy, he keeps a secret: Eugene does not exist. He is in fact the first computer program to pass the Turing test, which checks the ability of software to behave with human-like intelligence. In text message conversations, he convinced 33% of the flesh-and-blood raters that he was actually a person. The experiment took place in 2014, the 60th anniversary of the death of the test’s creator, mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing.
Turing believed that machines could achieve the performance of the human brain. In 1950, he went on to speculate further on the subject by publishing the paper Computational Machinery and Intelligence, in which he introduced the concept of “imitation play.”
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