At the annual Turing Test held at University of Reading in the U.K., five artificial conversational entities (ACEs) competed in a series of five minute unrestricted conversations with human interrogators. " No robot has ever passed the Turing Test, which requires the robot to fool 30% of its human interrogators.

"During the tests, all of the ACEs managed to fool at least one of their human interrogators," a University of Reading spokesman said. Though one of the machines, named Elbot, came closer with a success rate of 25 percent in persuading human beings that they were conversing with other humans, it couldn’t pass the standard of 30 percent, as set by the famous British mathematician Alan Turing, often considered to be the father of modern computer science. He worked at Bletchley Park during World War II and developed a number of techniques for cracking German ciphers, including the method of the Bombe, an electromechanical machine capable of locating settings for the Enigma machine. Back in 1950 Turing argued that conversation was proof of intelligence. If a computer talked like a human, then for all practical purposes it thought like a human too.

Elbot is not the product of a large and well-funded research team, but was written by one man, Fred Roberts. The program can be tested from within a browser by visiting the Elbot homepage.

Professor Kevin Warwick from the University’s School of Systems Engineering said, “This demonstrates how close machines are getting to reaching the milestone of communicating with us in a way in which we are comfortable.”