Alan Turing led a team of code breakers at Bletchley Park which cracked the German Enigma machine cypher during WWII -- but that is far from being his only legacy.
In the year of the 100th anniversary of his birth, researchers published a series of 'Turing tests' in the Journal of Experimental & Theoretical Artificial Intelligence; these entailed a series of five minute conversations between human and machine or human and human. Judges were tasked with identifying whether who they were talking to was human or a computer. Can machines be successful in 'being human' in real conversations? The resultant transcripts presented in this paper reveal fascinating insights into human interactions and our understanding of artificial intelligence.
In 12 out of 13 tests the judge wrongly identified the interlocutor as machine when in fact they were human. Turing tests were designed to study machine 'thinking' through language and ultimately establish if a machine could foil an interrogator into believing it were genuinely human. So, why in this case did so many believe the reverse?
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