Loebner Prize

Can a machine think? It was the 1950 when Alan Turing, in the famous article "Computing Machinery and Intelligence", asked himself (and to the entire world) this burning question. The english mathematician was convinced that it was possible to answer affermatively to the question in the case in which a "machine" (e.g. a computer or a soft-bot) was able to overcome an "imitation game" called Turing test.

Since the 1990 it was created a prize to implement the Turing test in an international competition contest: the Loebner Prize.

At this contest partecipate a set of selectioned "agents" from around the world. This year the competition will be held at the Reading University and there are six finalist systems (Alice, Ultra Hal, Brother Jerome, Elbot, Eugene Goostam and Jabberwacky).

This is the fact. But the critical question is: if a "machine" will be able to fully overcome the Turing test can it be really considered as "intelligent" or, better, as "thinking"? In other words: is it the overcoming of the "imitation game" test a necessary and sufficient condition to state that a machine is able to think?

In don't think so. It's is well known, in fact, (as even pointed out by Marco Varone) that there are a set of "tricks", based on the principle of "dialogue predictability" throught the extraction of keywords from text, that are easily implementable within a computer software but that do not represent a real form of machine textual comprehension.