The Most Human Human

How do you prove you're human?

Here's a article by a man who participated in an annual contest based on the Turing Test. Live contestants and computers carry on conversations with judges who try to identify which dialogue partners are people and which are machines:

Mind vs. Machine

One thing he discovered was that longer, looser conversations favor the human conversationalist, while a computer can put on a convincing show of sentience during a short, tightly structured dialogue but will eventually break down into nonsense if you keep it "talking" long enough.

This author harps a bit too much on the "there are some things machines will never be able to do" theme for my taste, but it's an interesting article anyway. Yet another illustration of how tasks hard for our brains are easy for computers and vice versa.

Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt