April 2, 2011 - The University of California, San Diego, has released a research study that claims to provide the first "empirical evidence that an artificial intelligence system can pass the standard tripartite Turing test". The Turing test was proposed in 1950 by British mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing, who called it "the imitation game. Turing envisioned that if a questioner could not distinguish between a machine and a human when communicating through text, then the machine might have human-like intelligence. In the three-way Turing test, the questioner is asked to engage in a conversation with a human and a machine, and accurately identify the human...