About

About The Turing Hub

The Turing Hub is a kind of switchboard that connects people to chatterbots or other people for the express purpose of having a conversation with something and then being asked to describe what it was you were talking to. This activity is part of the Turing test.

At this site, our goal is to be able to present each visitor with a verbal behavior experience using identical interfaces for the possibility of conversation. We want to see if people have more than a 70% chance of guessing the true identity of their conversational partner.

Turing predicted that machines would eventually be able to pass the test. In fact, he estimated that by the year 2000, machines with a billion bits (about 119 MB) of memory would be able to fool 30% of human judges during a 5-minute test. He also predicted that people would then no longer consider the phrase "thinking machine" contradictory. He further predicted that machine learning would be an important part of building powerful machines, a claim which is considered to be plausible by contemporary researchers in Artificial intelligence.

Why are there no scores for the human beings? It is not feasible for us to man the chat room 24/7 as the bots do, so we must take turns in shifts talking to people through the disguise of one or more of the chat bots. The URL may look like you're takling to a bot, but we are able to take control at the beginning of the conversation. At this point, we have not compiled a composite score of the various human beings who chat here. We are more interested in perfecting the chat bots at this point, and depending on which human does the chatting, it is obvious to us who the human is. When you give a score for one of the humans, we log it in a separate category from the bots, but that category is not available on the scores page.

There are some technical limitations associated with this network. This project would not be possible without The Human Beings.

This project bears no relationship to Albert One or the Loebner Prize Contest. Though some of the participants here are past Loebner Prize contestants, it has not always been possible to utilize programs like Albert One as web applications. At present, this site is a proof of concept primarily.

See the TuringHub Blog for the project diary.

[main page] What's with the bicycle you may ask? This is our homage to the classic television series, The Prisoner, with Patrick McGoohan's famous line, "I am not a number! I am a free man!" It is a part of human nature to resist automation because of the fear that it takes away our ability to decide for ourselves, our free will.