SCIENCE IN THE NEWS DAILY

Can a Computer Be Programmed to Be Cunning Yet Fallible?

from the Economist

If a computer could fool a person into thinking that he were interacting with another person rather than a machine, then it could be classified as having artificial intelligence. That, at least, was the test proposed in 1950 by Alan Turing, a British mathematician. Turing envisaged a typed exchange between machine and person, so that a genuine conversation could happen without the much harder problem of voice emulation having to be addressed.

More recently, the abilities of computers to play games such as chess, go and bridge has been regarded as a form of artificial intelligence. But the latest effort to use machines to emulate the way people interact with one another focuses neither on natural languages nor traditional board and card games. Rather, it concentrates on that icon of modernity, the shoot-'em-up computer game.

At a symposium on computational intelligence and games organised in Milan this week by America's Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, researchers are taking part in a competition called the 2K BotPrize. The aim is to trick human judges into thinking they are playing against other people in such a game.