New Scientist: In 1952 Alan Turing introduced the best-known version of his eponymous test of artificial intelligence: If a human talking to a machine believes he or she is talking to a human, the machine has passed the test. Cleverbot, software created by Rollo Carpenter, passed a formal Turing test at the Techniche festival in Guwahati, India, on 3 September. Carpenter says passing the test indicates the ability to imitate intelligence, rather than proving the presence of intelligence itself. During the test, 30 volunteers conducted a typed 4-minute conversation with an unknown entity. Half of them conversed with humans, while the other half conversed with Cleverbot. The software was judged to be human by 59.3% of the people who interacted with it—not far off from the 63.3% of actual humans judged as such during the test.
The finding that the Saturnian moon may host layers of icy slush instead of a global ocean could change how planetary scientists think about other icy moons as well.
Modeling the shapes of tree branches, neurons, and blood vessels is a thorny problem, but researchers have just discovered that much of the math has already been done.
January 29, 2026 12:52 PM
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