Sarah Palin: Putting artificial intelligence to the test

Finally a good use for Sarah Palin: Discover Magazine reports that the name of the former vice-presidential candidate has now been used as a question in the famous Loebner Prize competition. The Loebner Prize is probably the best-known annual contest in artificial intelligence, awarding prizes to those contestants who manage to build a chatting robot ...

Finally a good use for Sarah Palin: Discover Magazine reports that the name of the former vice-presidential candidate has now been used as a question in the famous Loebner Prize competition. The Loebner Prize is probably the best-known annual contest in artificial intelligence, awarding prizes to those contestants who manage to build a chatting robot that judges consider to be most human-like. Held in the form of a classic Turing test, the contest usually consists of a judge positing questions to a computer program and a human being via a computer, with the judge then trying to decide which is which.

Finally a good use for Sarah Palin: Discover Magazine reports that the name of the former vice-presidential candidate has now been used as a question in the famous Loebner Prize competition. The Loebner Prize is probably the best-known annual contest in artificial intelligence, awarding prizes to those contestants who manage to build a chatting robot that judges consider to be most human-like. Held in the form of a classic Turing test, the contest usually consists of a judge positing questions to a computer program and a human being via a computer, with the judge then trying to decide which is which.

Apparently, one of the human "subjects" participating in the most recent contest — a librarian from France — had simply never heard of Sarah Palin, causing the judge, a reporter for the London Times, to believe that this was the bot and not a human being talking to him.

Evgeny Morozov is a fellow at the Open Society Institute and sits on the board of OSI's Information Program. He writes the Net Effect blog on ForeignPolicy.com
Tag: France

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