Machines have come close to intimidating human communication at an artificial intelligence competition at the University of Reading.

As part of the 18th Loebner Prize, all of the artificial conversational entries (ACEs) competing to pass the Turing Test have managed to fool at least one of their human interrogators that they were in fact communicating with a human rather than a machine. One of the ACE’s, the eventual winner, got close to the 30 per cent Turing Test threshold set by British mathematician, Alan Turing, by fooling 25 per cent of human interrogators.

During the Turing Test, the ACEs competed in a series of five minute long, unrestricted conversations with human interrogators, attempting to pass themselves off as human. The interrogators did not know whether they were conversing with a human or a machine during the test.

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Researchers from Harvard Medical School have developed Little b, a new computer language that can ‘think’ in the same way as cells and molecular mechanisms, offering the potential for researchers to discover particulars of, for example, drug interactions on the computer desktop.

Most computational methods of modelling biological systems are not unlike writing a document with a pen and paper. Each new project starts from scratch; there are no facilities for cutting and pasting, for linking to other texts, for including images, etc – things that come so ‘naturally’ to electronic documents.

Harvard Medical School researcher Jeremy Gunawardena, a trained mathematician, teamed up with cell biologist and computer scientist Aneil Mallavarapu to eliminate these limitations.

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Engineers at Duke University believe that the results of feasibility studies conducted in their laboratory represent the first concrete steps towards robots performing surgery on patients in dangerous situations, or in remote locations, such as on the battlefield, or in space, with minimal human guidance.

On a more immediate level, the technology developed by the engineers could make certain contemporary medical procedures safer for patients.

For their experiments, the engineers started with a rudimentary tabletop robot whose “eyes” used a novel 3-D ultrasound technology developed in the Duke laboratories. An artificial intelligence program served as the robot’s “brain” by taking real-time 3-D information, processing it, and giving the robot specific commands to perform.

Stephen Smith, director of the Duke University Ultrasound Transducer Group and senior member of the research team, explained: “In a number of tasks, the computer was able to direct the robot’s actions.

“We believe that this is the first proof-of-concept for this approach. Given that we achieved these early results with a rudimentary robot and a basic artificial intelligence program, the technology will advance to the point where robots – without the guidance of the doctor – can someday operate on people.”

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