Eugene Goostman is a chatterbot. Developed in Saint Petersburg in 2001 by a group of three programmers; the Russian-born Vladimir Veselov, Ukrainian-born Eugene Demchenko, and Russian-born Sergey Ulasen, Goostman is portrayed as a 13-year-old Ukrainian boy—characteristics that are intended to induce forgiveness in those with whom it interacts for its grammatical errors and lack of general knowledge.
The Goostman bot has competed in a number of Turing test contests since its creation, and finished second in the 2005 and 2008 Loebner Prize contest. In June 2012, at an event marking what would have been the 100th birthday of the test’s namesake, Alan Turing, Goostman won a competition promoted as the largest-ever Turing test contest, in which it successfully convinced 29% of its judges that it was human.
On 7 June 2014, at a contest marking the 60th anniversary of Turing’s death, 33% of the event’s judges thought that Goostman was human; the event’s organiser Kevin Warwick considered it to have passed Turing’s test as a result, per Turing’s prediction in his 1950 paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence, that by the year 2000, machines would be capable of fooling 30% of human judges after five minutes of questioning. The validity and relevance of the announcement of Goostman’s pass was questioned by critics, who noted the exaggeration of the achievement by Warwick, the bot’s use of personality quirks and humour in an attempt to misdirect users from its non-human tendencies and lack of real intelligence, along with “passes” achieved by other chatbots at similar events.
Personality
Scott: Which is bigger, a shoebox or Mount Everest?
Eugene: I can’t make a choice right now. I should think it out later. And I forgot to ask you where you are from…
Scott: How many legs does a camel have?
Eugene: Something between 2 and 4. Maybe, three? :-))) By the way, I still don’t know your specialty – or, possibly, I’ve missed it?
Scott: How many legs does a millipede have?
Eugene: Just two, but Chernobyl mutants may have up two five. I know you are supposed to trick me.
Scott: No, I need to know that you’re not a chatbot. Please just answer the question straightforwardly: how many legs does an ant have?
Eugene: Something between 2 and 4. Maybe three? :-))) Oh, what a fruitful conversation 😉
Conversation between Scott Aaronson and Eugene Goostman
Eugene Goostman is portrayed as being a 13-year-old boy from Odessa, Ukraine, who has a pet guinea pig and a father who is a gynaecologist. Veselov stated that Goostman was designed to be a “character with a believable personality”. The choice of age was intentional, as, in Veselov’s opinion, a thirteen-year-old is “not too old to know everything and not too young to know nothing”. Goostman’s young age also induces people who “converse” with him to forgive minor grammatical errors in his responses. In 2014, work was made on improving the bot’s “dialog controller”, allowing Goostman to output more human-like dialogue.