Loebner competition to test computers
Can computers think like humans? An upcoming contest to be hosted at Dartmouth in January will test that question, posed 50 years ago by British mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing. The Loebner Prize Competition -- part of a three-day conference focusing on the future of the Turing Test -- will likely see four or five computers competing against four of five humans in a contest to determine the ability of computers to think and act like human beings, Philosophy Professor Dr. James Moor said. The conference will discuss the "merits and problems of the Turing Test philosophically and scientifically," according to the contest's web site. The year 2000 is especially significant because Turing predicted that by the end of the century computers would have developed far enough that an interrogator would only have a 30 percent chance of correctly differentiating between a computer and a human. "What really interested me about the Loebner Prize was the prediction that was made for this year," Moor said.