Computers are wonderful for logical computations but when it comes to acting human, they’ve got a long way to go. Sure, there are all kinds of interactive games and chat features on the internet. Burger King launched their Subservient Chicken where you can type in commands and watch a human dressed as a chicken perform various tasks. If you’ve ever wanted to ask God a question, you can head over to iGod and chat away.

Scientific American Mind has a great article on where we are with artificial intelligence. Over 50 years ago, British mathematician, Alan Turing, wrote a paper ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence.’

Turning simply replaced the question ‘Can machines think?’ with ‘Can a machine - a computer - pass the imitation game?’ That is, can a computer converse so naturally that it could fool a person into thinking that it was a human being?

Turing took his idea from a simple parlor game in which a person, called the interrogator, must determine, by asking a series of questions, whether or not an unseen person in another room is a man or a woman. In his thought experiment he replaced the person in the other room with a computer. To pass what is now called the Turing Test, the computer must answer any question from an interrogator with the linguistic competency and sophistication of a human being.

Turing ended his seminal paper with the prediction that in 50 years’ time - which is right about now - we would be able to build computers that are so good at playing the imitation game that an average interrogator will have only a 70% chance of correctly identifying whether he or she is speaking to a person or a machine.

Sadly, as of now, no computer has ever passed the Turing Test. There are a number of reasons why this has proved challenging:

1) Language Skills - Computers need to understand words in their context. For instance the word ‘bank’ could refer to a financial institution or a river bank.

2) Background Knowledge - Computers need to understand how things associate with one another. For instance, they need more than logic to answer ‘Where is Sue’s nose when Sue is in the house.’ They have to know that a nose is attached to a person. Or, if Sue had a nose job, the computer might have to ask which part of Sue’s nose you are referring to. Trying to write software that accounts for all possibilities is extremely difficult.

With any test, there are a number of objections, but the Turing Test is still a standard for artificial intelligence.