A "super computer" has duped humans into thinking it was a 13-year-old boy to become the first machine to pass the "iconic" Turing Test, experts say.

Five machines were tested at the Royal Society in central London to see if they could fool people into thinking they were humans during text-based conversations.

The test was devised in 1950 by computer science pioneer and World War II code breaker Alan Turing, who said that if a machine was indistinguishable from a human, then it was "thinking".

No computer had ever previously passed the Turing Test, which requires 30 per cent of human interrogators to be duped during a series of five-minute keyboard conversations, organisers from the University of Reading said.

But "Eugene Goostman", a computer program developed to simulate a 13-year-old boy, managed to convince 33 per cent of the judges that it was human, the university said.

Professor Kevin Warwick, from the University of Reading, said: "In the field of artificial intelligence there is no more iconic and controversial milestone than the Turing Test.

"It is fitting that such an important landmark has been reached at the Royal Society in London, the home of British science and the scene of many great advances in human understanding over the centuries. This milestone will go down in history as one of the most exciting."

http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/computers/super-computer-first-to-pass-turing-test-convince-judges-its-alive-20140608-zs1bu.html

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I believe that our own Tony is an old 386 computer inside a store window dummy trying to fool us that its intelligence is above that of a potty-trained four year old. As well, the Abbottgootsman386 has many glitches, like saying one thing one day and telling the opposite the next, depending on its audience. The Abbottgootsman believes that this is a sign of intelligence, as only idiots do not change their minds, but the store dummy inspection headquarters think that dummy changing minds like red underpants is a sign of derangement in the budgie module.

The geezer even walks like a badly balanced dummy that has been riding a wooden horse for too long. One of the worrying part in the Abbottgootsman386, is the religious belief sub-board that tells it to be humble and generous but contrarily acts as if a god with orange sadistic lifeboats.