khedron

This article about a computer passing the Turing test in California just came in via the ACM TechBriefs, with no warning that it was a joke:

"Well, what's happened here is not that the computers got smarter - the people got dumber," said computer science professor Henrietta DeMarcos. "The big annual competition, the Loebner Competition, is held in New York, you see. And every year, the best programs there couldn't fool the judges into thinking they were New Yorkers. But mimicking products of the California education system is another matter altogether."

Partial transcripts of the IBM Almaden tests do indicate that the human 'controls' used as blind points of comparison with Maisy 5 exhibited a remarkable lack of knowledge about basic social concepts, were prone to frequent non-sequiturs, and in short were not capable of carrying on a convincing conversation.

Sigh!