From David Bateman
I was excited to read that a computer program had fooled a quarter of the judges into thinking it was human in a 5-minute text-based conversation, thereby winning this year’s Loebner prize (online news, 13 October). This is just under the 30 per cent required to pass their version of the Turing test, which has stood for 50 years as the benchmark to test whether software can think for itself. From the press coverage you might be forgiven for fearing scientient computers were about to march out over the world in a Schwarzenegger-inspired apocalypse.
But, unbeknownst to many, man-made intelligence lives among us and already passes the Turing test. Examples include customer email auto-responders; SMS information services; online interactive assistants; celebrity text lines which respond to users in the signature style of the celebrity; automated flirting software and malicious online robots that stalk gambling sites, preying on unsuspecting humans for real money.
In the real world, a well-designed interface can overcome the problems that brute-force computing cannot. A limited context helps: you would hope a double glazing firm would only get questions about windows. Keep a database of successfully answered questions, back it up with a human operator to handle difficult queries, and if all else fails, pretend to be young, foreign, funny or Ozzy Osbourne.
Most of the time, the user won’t know or won’t care about the origin of the message as long as they get good service. The real test is getting people to pay for meaningful automated interaction and it has already been passed.
• While David Bateman was writing this, Nic Fleming was writing an article on poker-playing robots (15 November, p 28).