Not only has the Turing Test been passed, but it was the IEEE who accepted the computer as a human, publised its paper, and asked it to chair a session at the CSSE (Computer Science and Software Engineering) 2008 Conference held a few weeks ago. Alan Turing proposed a test of intelligence as a replacement for the question “Can machines think?” back in 1950, and there is even an award, the Loebner Prize, for whoever pulls it off. The test itself is simple: if a conversation with the computer was indistinguishable from that with a human,the computer could be said to be thinking. The machine that generated the paper accepted by the world’s leading professional association for the advancement of technology was SCIgen – An Automatic CS Paper Generator, and this is not the first time it passed for human. This MIT-built program was also accepted to the 2005 WMSCI conference and has been published elsewhere; you can get details on its blog.
