When I read about Eugene Goostman, the computer program which is so good at “small talk” that it fooled 33% of the judges at a recent contest into thinking it was a human typing at a keyboard, I couldn’t resist the idea of giving it a challenge. After working for ten years as a computer programmer, researching the nature of mind for a philosophy thesis, and teaching English conversation for more than a dozen years in Japan, I figured I’d be able to bamboozle Eugene with some very simple, innocent-sounding questions. And I was right. From a couple of brief, exploratory forays, I quickly established that Eugene was able to answer questions of the “Hello, how are you?” variety, that Read More ›