May 25, 2012, 4:48 AM PDT

Takeaway: Mankind has long been fascinated by the idea of intelligent machines, but in the information age the sci-fi dream of creating a human-like AI appears increasingly anachronistic.

The idea of creating a sentient machine has fascinated mankind for centuries. And while sci-fi offers artificial intelligences that rival our own, the fiction bears little resemblance to real world AI.

AI is all around us, not as a synthetic overlord, but as specialised software that help fly planes and run factory production lines. For many, the idea of creating thinking machines has become a distant dream.

However, not everyone has given up on the idea of creating a machine that can think like a man. Inventor Hugh Loebner is at the forefront of the hunt: each year for more than two decades Loebner has run a competition based on the Turing Test, the game devised by British mathematician and father of computing Alan Turing in 1950 to identify a thinking machine.

In the Loebner Prize competition, software known as chatbots conduct instant messenger or verbal conversations with human judges, attempting to fool them into believing they are a real person.

Any bot that fools half the judges can win up to $100,000 for its creator, and each year there is a $2,000 prize for bot deemed to be most human-like.

Turing predicted that a machine able to fool people into thinking it was human in one third of conversations would exist by 2000.

And yet so far the performance of the chatbots has been underwhelming: after 22 years of contests no bot has come close to fooling half of the judges into thinking it is human. Bots make convincing humans during short chats, but their credibility breaks down in a prolonged conversation.

Even Loebner, for all of the time and effort he has invested, says he has little passion for event, and continues to run it largely out of a sense of obligation.

Visit link:

Artificial Intelligence: What happened to the hunt for thinking machines?