The Turing Hub

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The Turing Hub is an online Turing test devised so that various web-based resources may be connected together like a telephone switchboard so that groups of two people may converse or a person may interact with a chatterbot. After the conversation, an opinion poll is interrogated. The results show how human the bots are and how robotic the humans are.[1]

The website serves as an arrangement between several chatterbot authors to participate in an ongoing online Turing test.[2] Visitors to the site may elect to be partnered with a conversationalist at random. After a five minute conversation, the visitor is asked to rate the conversation on a "humanness" scale. These ratings are tallied so that an ongoing experiment becomes possible.

It was the designers' intention that the "hub" be used for learning how to build better bots and as an illustration of just how very far away we are from building truly intelligent software entities. The experience is something like being a judge at a Loebner Prize contest or other instantiation of the Alan Turing Imitation game.[3]

Teachers of philosophy, computer science, and Artificial Intelligence classes have used The Turing Hub website to introduce students to chatterbots and the Turing test.

Participating chatterbot designers include:

Rollo Carpenter
Richard Wallace
Dr. Vladimir Vesselov
Robby Garner

[edit] Notes and references

  1. ^ Robert Epstein, Gary Roberts and Grace Beber "The Turing Hub as a Standard for Turing Test Interfaces", Parsing The Turing Test, 2008. Springer
  2. ^ Ayse Pinar Saygin "The Turing Test Page"
  3. ^ Rollo Carpenter "Jabberwacky", Take a Turing Test