The Turing Test for Video

Readers of this blog will know we follow developments in robotics. Here is one such (from the Daily Mail, via Nick Carr).



AI/IT pioneer Alan Turing devised the Turing Test to define when we may know a device is intelligent - when it can fool a human into thinking it is one. His test was pre internet, so needed Sneakernet (or in his time, Shoenet). The test says that:

....a human judge engages in a natural language conversation with one human and one machine, each of which try to appear human. All participants are placed in isolated locations. If the judge cannot reliably tell the machine from the human, the machine is said to have passed the test. In order to test the machine's intelligence rather than its ability to render words into audio, the conversation is limited to a text-only channel such as a computer keyboard and screen

No one could tell you were a dog on the text internet, it is true. But a project, called 'Human-Robot Interaction', was devised at the Bristol Robotics Laboratory (BRL), run by the University of the West of England and the University of Bristol. A team of robotics engineers - Chris Melhuish, Neill Campbell and Peter Jaeckel - spent three-and-a-half years developing the breakthrough software to create interaction between humans and artificial intelligence.

So look at the above video, and make your guess about how long it will take before machines can pass the Turing test on a video channel. 5 years? 10 years?