BackA brave new world
A computer programme managed to convince a third of humans it was interacting with through text conversations that it was actually a 13-year-old boy
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The supercomputer called Deep Blue won a controversial six-game match against reigning chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997, a year after the human had beaten the machine. The matches led to ample debate about whether intelligent machines were finally a reality.
An even bigger event took place this week. A computer programme managed to convince a third of humans it was interacting with through text conversations that it was actually a 13-year-old boy. It passed a milestone for testing artificial intelligence—the Turing Test, named after the pioneering computer scientist and World War 2 codebreaker Alan Turing.
Cinema has provided technophobic peeks into a future dominated by intelligent machines—from the enslavement of humans in The Matrix to the love affair of a lonely man with an intelligent computer programme in Her. The reality is likely to be more benign.
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