LONDON, June 9 (UPI) -- A computer posing as a 13-year-old Ukrainian boy passed the Turing test for the first time Saturday, fooling 33 percent of judges into thinking it was human.
Over one-third of the judges who "chatted" with the computer program were fooled into thinking they were talking to Eugene Goostman, a son of a gynecologist who loves to eat hamburgers and candy. At the Royal Society in London, a panel of judges wrote a series of questions to be answered by both humans and the computer. They then had to determine which answers were given by the human and which were given by the computer.
More than 30 percent of the judges must be persuaded for the computer to pass the test.
"Our main idea was that he can claim that he knows anything, but his age also makes it perfectly reasonable that he doesn't know everything," said Russian engineer Vladimir Veselov, who created the program with Ukrainian engineer Eugene Demchenko