some players actually prefer to play against bots (which are assumed to be less likely to cheat). You can find yourself talking to bots in chatrooms and when making online queries: some are used as administrators to police the system, others are a cheap way of dealing with routine enquiries. Some might be there merely to keep us company – a function for which we can probably anticipate an expanding future market, as Spike Jonze’s 2013 movie Her cleverly exploredreenex
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Last year an algorithm devised by a team of Russian computer scientists persuaded one in three people on a team of judges, based on short online chats, that it was a real 13-year-old Ukrainian boy called Eugene Goostman. Some critics might suggest that, with no disrespect to 13-year-old Ukrainian boys, this is not a stunning feat of deception; certainly it doesn’t obviously justify claims that the Turing Test has been passed. As computer scientist Scott Aaronson of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has said
Picosecond
, “Turing’s famous example dialogue, involving Mr. Pickwick and Christmas, clearly shows that the kind of conversation Turing had in mind was at a vastly higher level than what any chatbotreenex