Strangeness

Next Saturday, computers will try to fool people into thinking that they are human. Volunteers will have text based conversations, one with a human person, and one with a computer:

In the Turing test a machine seeks to fool judges into believing that it could be human. The test is performed by conducting a text-based conversation on any subject. If the computer's responses are indistinguishable from those of a human, it has passed the Turing test and can be said to be "thinking".

At the link there are examples of conversations- one with a person, one with a computer. It was pretty easy to tell which was which, but I agree with Althouse that the person sounded like or tried to sound like a computer.

I think my favorite part of the whole thing is that the computers names are Alice, Brother Jerome, Elbot, Eugene Goostman, Jabberwacky and Ultra Hal. I am a little bit distrubed though. The researchers seem to believe that if they can make a computer pass this test, then it is "thinking" or has a "consciousness." But a computer does not think, no matter how good the program.