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New Computer Could Be First True Artificial Intelligence

by Tim Stevens on March 14, 2008 at 03:40 PM

AI's Benchmark Turing Test Finally Set for Defeat?A smart computer is growing at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in upstate NY. It's not the beginnings of Skynet (we hope) and won't be able to drive your car for you or do anything else you might consider practical. But, if everything goes right, it might just be able to fool you into thinking it's human, becoming the first such device to pass the benchmark Turing Test.

In 1950 computer science and artificial intelligence pioneer Alan Turing proposed a simple test that has since come to be synonymous with his name. In his test, a person using a monitor and keyboard chats with with an anonymous entity using only text. The person is free to ask any question they like to try to figure out if the entity on the other end of the wire is a person or just a computer pretending to be one. Turing proposed that if you couldn't tell the difference between the two the machine has passed the test.

In the 58 years since, no machine has repeatedly passed the test and RPI's researchers believe they may be the first when their "Rascals" system is fully ready to roll in October. It's powered by the world's fastest supercomputer, IBM's Blue Gene, which is so fast we can't easily compare it to even the fastest desktop computers without filling this post with a lot of 0's. Suffice it to say it would take a couple trillion PlayStation 3's with their powerful Cell Processors to match what that thing can do.
OMG!

From Engadget

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Tags: IBM, PS3, RPI, Supercomputer, Turing Test, TuringTest

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