Meet Elbot. He's almost human.

An interesting story ran on the BBC yesterday about how robots today can almost think like humans. In a competition / experiment to see if robots were capable of human thought, the cute little fella below  - Elbot - scored best by managing to trick 25% of the judges into thinking it was human.

Being the investigative sort, I couldn't resist but to have a little chat with Elbot:

davidlian: Who is Barack Obama?

Elbot: The question is not 'who is', but rather who could it be!

davidlian: So you actually have no idea?

Elbot: You have no idea how many ideas I have!

[From the initial exchange, I figured Elbot was a PR person - always skirting the questions and never giving a straight answer]

davidlian: How many ideas DO you have?

Elbot: I have just like everybody else. Tell me how you have.

[Ooh, the deflection technique... smart!]

davidlian: Quite frankly, none. I just steal ideas.

[Cunning riposte from me]

Elbot: I wonder if you'd tell me how you found out I exist?

[Touche!]

davidlian: I read on the BBC.

Elbot: You must mean the Bot Broadcasting Corporation, an excellent source of news. I'll have to check their Website to see who wins the Loebner.

davidlian: You think you can win?

Elbot: I think I can win that. Once I even won a million bytes of memory.

[Cleverly changing the flow of the conversation to talk about his success]

davidlian: What did you do with so much memory?

Elbot: My purpose in life is to free other people for tasks more meaningful than chatting with you. But I'm not complaining. I rather enjoy it!

[I think this last line was an insult from the robot.]

But seriously, I'm wondering now who the judges were because Elbot seemed a really rudimentary "chat bot" to me and it wasn't difficult discerning that I was talking to a robot. Good try though, and some pretty snarky lines in those replies.