As anyone struggling to navigate a tangled web of automated customer service knows, most computers have a long way to go before they can impersonate a human. In this engaging and thought-provoking book, Christian describes his efforts to keep machines in their place.
The chapters follow Christian’s preparations for a competition in which artificial intelligence programs try to pass as human — a form of a test proposed by Alan Turing in 1950. Turing said that a machine could be considered to “think” when it could convince human judges they’re talking with another person. Each year computers get a little closer when they compete against humans in the Loebner Prize’s “Most Human Computer” contest.
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