text: • Turing test beaten for first time by virtual 13-year-old boy
  • What is the Turing test? And are we all doomed now?
  From 2001: a Space Odyssey to Her, the idea of an intelligent computer that can hold conversations with humans has long been a dream of science-fiction writers, but that fantasy may just have taken a step closer to becoming reality. On Saturday, a computer algorithm claiming to be a 13-year-old boy called Eugene Goostman passed the Turing test, it has been claimed. However, some commentators have suggested that pretending to be a 13-year-old Ukrainian child is not as difficult as pretending to be an Anglophone adult, and that the result should not count.
  The program convinced 33% of the human judges at an event at the Royal Society that it was actually a human. The Turing test, which was devised in 1950 by the pioneering computer scientist and second wold war codebreaker Alan Turing is a classic benchmark in artificial intelligence – it determines a machine's ability to show intelligent behaviour equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human.
  Transcripts of the conversations from the latest Royal Society test are not yet available but below are transcripts from a previous event at Bletchley Park on 23 June 2012, with the same program.
  Can you tell Eugene isn't human?
  In Spike Jonze's film Her, a computer is able to interact with a man so convincingly that he falls in love. Photograph: PR Photograph: PR
  Garry Kasparov versus Deep Blue in 1997. The computer won – an important step in the evolution of artificial intelligence. Photograph: Stan Honda/AFP/Getty Images Photograph: Stan Honda/AFP/Getty Images
  Best-case scenario? Friendly, intellectually curious robots like Johnny Five from Short Circuit. Photograph: Moviestore Collection/Rex Features Photograph: Moviestore Collection/Rex Features
  Worst-case scenario? Evil robots replace band members to try to stop the creation of a utopian society, as in Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey. Photograph: The Kobal Collection Photograph: The Kobal Collection
  Turing test: this little Eugene Goostman fellow was much brighter than I imagined
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