A killer app for computer chat

摘要

Computer scientists and hobbyists have spent years writing software that can hold rudimentary conversations with people. At last, a use for it is emerging. It might seem unfair to judge people's intelligence by the standard of their chitchat—yet that is exactly how the cleverness of computers is traditionally measured. In what is called a Turing test (after Alan Turing, a pioneering mathematician who invented it in 1950) a human judge sits at a computer terminal, through which he conducts a question-and-answer session with a second party that is either another human or a clever piece of software designed to imitate human responses. The software passes the test if thejudge is unable to tell whether he is having a conversation with a human being or a computer program.