For better or worse, I think robots are pretty cool, and some of the coolest ones out there are heart thumpingly, jaw droppingly siiiiiiiiiiiiick... They inspire awesome visions of the future, as though the rise of the machines has come and it's time we humans hung up our boots and went to live in caves, leaving all the tricky stuff to the machines. You know, the simple life.
But every now and then a piece of news- reassuring or deflating, depending on your outlook, comes along, and reminds you of what you knew ever since you were 6 and could never get that final Monkey island floppy to load, computers are FUCKING RUBBISH! I feel sorry for science fiction, as it waits patiently, drumming its fully articulated fingers for real science to catch up.
All this a propos of the fact that the Turing Test has been failed again. The Turing test? A simple benchmark test for artificial intelligence where a human judge enters into a text-based conversation in real language (think AIM without the lame smileys) with two mystery conversators (as Biggie might say) one of whom is a fellow human, the other a computer. If 30% of our judges fail to correctly identify the computer, we have a victory for the robots.
Doesn't sound too hard, right? But in 50 years and many attempts, it's never been broken, and by the sounds of things we still have a long way to go.
Sounds like I don't have to pack my AK and head off for Tora Bora just yet.
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