The Turing Test has been beaten for the first time by a supercomputer posing as 13-year-old "Eugene Goostman".
The computer fooled 33 percent of judges in a test held at the Royal Society in London into believing they were talking to a real human being.
The Turing Test was invented in 1950 by computing pioneer Alan Turing and involves a text-based conversation between the human judge and the computer.
If the computer can convince more than 30 percent of judges they are conversing with a human being and not a computer, the machine is deemed to have passed the test.
"In the field of artificial intelligence, there is no more iconic and controversial milestone than the Turing Test," said Professor Kevin Warwick, a visiting professor at the University of Reading, which organised the Turing Test 2014 event.
Warwick said passing the test marks an important milestone, particularly when it comes to cybercrime.
"It is important to understand more fully how online, real-time communication of this type can influence an individual human... into believing something is true... when in fact it is not," he said.
Vladimir Veselov, who with Eugene Demchenko helped create Eugene Goostman, said: "Our whole team is very excited with this result. It's a remarkable achievement for us and we hope it boosts interest in artificial intelligence and chatbots."
However, the achievement follows a trick of psychology, not a leap in computing power. Last year, the same chatbot scored four points fewer, failing the test. This year, Veselov said the key to success was having the programme claim to know anything but, because of his professed age of 13, the judge would find it reasonable that "he" actually didn't.
"It’s interesting because they used a trick of human psychology to win votes (fair play), but it tells us nothing much about AI," noted science writer Martin Robbins on Twitter.
The team will now work on making Eugene Goostman "smarter" and improving its "conversation logic".
-1.jpg&w=100&c=1&s=0)
.png&w=100&c=1&s=0)
