Is this the most human computer ever?

A piece of artificial intelligence software made a few waves among scientists this week, after it fooled almost 60% of an audience into thinking it was human.

The software, known as a chatbot, was put to the test at a large event in Guwahati, India. Thirty volunteers took part in a typed four-minute conversation, but they didn’t know who they were chatting with. Half of the volunteers were typing messages to humans, while the other half were chatting with a neat bit of software called Cleverbot.

The conversations were all displayed on screens, so that the audience could vote on which of the 30 mystery guests were humans and which were Cleverbot.

The responses of the 1,334 audience members showed that Cleverbot was voted 59.3% human. However, the 15 humans in the test only managed to get 63.3%!

A trial like this is known as a Turing test, after the famous British computer scientist Alan Turing. In the 1950s, he said that any machine that could fool someone into thinking it was human would pass the test.

Although Cleverbot fooled some people, its developer is keeping his feet on the ground.

“It doesn’t mean Cleverbot is thinking,” said Rollo Carpenter. "One could argue that there was perhaps a bit of intelligence involved in what is going on, but I think one would have to distinguish thinking from the word intelligence."

Carpenter says that passing the Turing test does not mean that Cleverbot is intelligent, it just means that it can imitate intelligence. Cleverbot ‘learns’ by having online conversations with thousands of people, although the online version is an older version of the software. The new version used in the tests in India performs 42 searches through its database of conversations for each question it was asked. That's compared to just three for the online Cleverbot.

However, talking to the online Cleverbot is still a pretty cool way to spend ten minutes of your time, especially as you'll be helping to expand its vocabulary and conversation techniques. Click here to see how human you think Cleverbot is by talking to it yourself!

You can also check out the amazingly funny video below, which shows what happened when two Cleverbots had a conversation together!

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