Computers fail to fool humans

Six artificial conversational entities (ACEs) have failed to fool interrogators into thinking they were human during a real-time chat.

Although all the ACEs passed themselves off as human to at least one individual, the programs did not manage to convince 30 per cent of the participants, thereby failing the famous 1950 threshold set by Alan Turing.

Indeed, the winning machine, known as Elbot, only achieved a 25 percent success rate.

According to Kevin Warwick from the University of Reading's School of Systems Engineering, the test was designed to "raise the bar in Artificial Intelligence".

Warwick explained that while the machines weren't yet good enough to fool all the people all of the time, they were certainly capable of "fooling some of the people some of the time".

Warwick also noted that the conversational abilities of each machine was scored at an impressive 80 and 90 percent.

"This demonstrates how close machines are getting to reaching the milestone of communicating with us in a way in which we are comfortable", said Warwick.

Alan Turing, often considered to be the father of modern computer science, worked at Bletchley Park during World War II. He developed a number of techniques for cracking German ciphers, including the method of the Bombe, an electromechanical machine capable of locating settings for the Enigma machine.

In addition, Turing assisted US-based Bell Labs with the development of secure speech devices.