Japanese AI Almost Passes Turing Test

Artificial Intelligence Outperforms Average High School Senior

Artificial intelligence in Japan is getting closer to entering college. AI software scored higher on the English section of Japan’s standardized college entrance test than the average Japanese high school senior, its developers said.

The software, known as To-Robo, almost doubled its score on a multiple choice test from its performance a year ago, indicating progress toward a goal set by its developers to eventually pass the entrance exam for Tokyo University, Japan’s most prestigious college.

“The average score for the English section of the standardized entrance exam was 93.1 (out of 200), but the AI scored 95,” a spokesman for NTT Science and Core Technology Laboratory Group said. Last year the software scored 52.

Just being smarter than the average high school student doesn't prove an Artificial Intelligence is equivalent to a real human being. After all, high school students are not yet fully human.

The Turing test is a test of a machine's ability to exhibit intelligent behavior equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human. In the original illustrative example, a human judge engages in natural language conversations with a human and a machine designed to generate performance indistinguishable from that of a human being. All participants are separated from one another. If the judge cannot reliably tell the machine from the human, the machine is said to have passed the test. The test does not check the ability to give the correct answer to questions; it checks how closely the answer resembles typical human answers. The conversation is limited to a text-only channel such as a computer keyboard and screen so that the result is not dependent on the machine's ability to render words into audio.

An AI cannot be judged intelligent until it can become neurotic.