The “Turing Test” Gets Passed By – AI Game Bots
For those not familiar with the “Turing Test” it is the test used to determine if machines, or computers, can exhibit intelligent behavior. This is decided by a human judge engaging in conversation using specific question with both an unseen human and unseen “machine” and the supposition being that if the human judge can not tell from the answer being given which is the human and which is the machine then at that point the machine can be considered to be intelligent.
This is an exceptionally simplistic, and probably wrong in some parts, explanation of the test but it would seem that this moment has been reached by some computer scientists at The University of Texas at Austin. In a contest that took place within Unreal Tournament 2004 the computer scientists were able to create an in-game bot that the other players in the game really believed was a human being.
When the human players were asked to tag other characters in the game; which included the bot-controlled characters, it was found that the winning bot – UT^2 – got a score of 52%.
Professor Risto Miikkulainen said his goal was to achieve a score of at least 50%. UT^2 actually shared the victory with the equally impressive MirrorBot, which was created by Romanian programmer Mihai Polceanu. Both winning teams split a $7,000 grand prize.
Interestingly enough, the average “humanness” rating that human players received was just 40%, meaning UT^2 played more like a human — or at least, other players’ perceptions of what a human should play like — than actual flesh-and-blood gamers.
via Geek.com
Now about that whole Skynet thing……
Comments
About the Author
Steven Hodson Steven has been around the tech world long enough to see most of the stuff we think of cool happen before which leads to a certain bit of cynicism that has contributed to him being known as the cranky old fart of the Internet. Besides sharing some of the goodness that he finds with you here at 42x you can also find him curating some digital goodness at Winextra (tech type stuff) and Rotten Gumdrops (for your daily dose of WTF).
