Sergey and Larry awarded the Seoul Test of Time Award from WWW 2015

Posted by Andrei Broder, Google Distinguished Scientist

Today, at the 24th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW) in Florence, Italy, our company founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, received the inaugural Seoul Test-of-Time Award for their 1998 paper “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine”, which introduced Google to the world at the 7th WWW conference in Brisbane, Australia. I had the pleasure and honor to accept the award on behalf of Larry and Sergey from Professor Chin-Wan Chung, who led the committee that created the award.

Except for the fact that I was myself in Brisbane, it is hard to believe that Google began just as a two-student research project at Stanford University 17 years ago with the goal to “produce much more satisfying search results than existing systems.” Their paper presented two breakthrough concepts: first, using a distributed system built on inexpensive commodity hardware to deal with the size of the index, and second, using the hyperlink structure of the Web as a powerful new relevance signal. By now these ideas are common wisdom, but their paper continues to be very influential: it has over 13,000 citations so far and more are added every day.

Since those beginnings Google has continued to grow, with tools that enable small business owners to reach customers, help long lost friends to reunite, and empower users to discover answers. We keep pursuing new ideas and products, generating discoveries that both affect the world and advance the state-of-the-art in Computer Science and related disciplines. From products like Gmail, Google Maps and Google Earth Engine to advances in Machine Intelligence, Computer Vision, and Natural Language Understanding, it is our continuing goal to create useful tools and services that benefit our users.

Larry and Sergey sent a video message to the conference expressing their thanks and their encouragement for future research, in which Sergey said “There is still a ton of work left to do in Search, and on the Web as a whole and I couldn’t think of a more exciting time to be working in this space.” I certainly share this view, and was very gratified by the number of young computer scientists from all over the world that came by the Google booth at the conference to share their thoughts about the future of search, and to explore the possibility of joining our efforts.

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Turing Test hasnt been passed

Sorry to confuse you, since my previous blog post claimed the Turing Test had been passed. On closer inspection scientists are now not so sure that the chat bot "Eugene Goostman", a computer programme developed to simulate a 13-year-old Ukrainian boy, actually passed Turings Imitation Game. Lets look at the evidence. First, Eugene only managed to convince 33% of the judges that it was human, therefore the majority of thought it wasnt human. Second, Eugenes developers are clearly gaming the game; by creating a persona who is a child and speaks English as a second language theyre lowering the judges expectations as to its ability to understand questions and give sensible answers. Transcripts of the conversations from the latest Royal Society test are not yet available but heres and excerpt from a transcript from a previous event at Bletchley Park on 23 June 2012, with the same program.
[15:02:56] Judge: I come from Manchester. Did you see the jubilee?
[15:03:02] Eugene: Could you invite me to Manchester? I would be so grateful. 
[15:03:17] Judge: Did you see the jubliee?
[15:03:27] Eugene: Try to guess! Actually, I dont understand why you are interested. I know you are supposed to trick me.
[15:03:35] Judge: Not really
[15:03:40] Eugene: Not really? Why? What are any interesting site-seeings in Manchester?
[15:03:59] Judge: Lots of nice things. Do you like football?
[15:04:04] Eugene: Does anyone hate it? Some another topic?
[15:04:18] Judge: Will you be watching the football on Sunday?

[15:04:23] Eugene: I play sports sometimes. On computer. But I prefer racing.

Lets analyse it. First, Eugene doesnt know what the Jubilee was - perhaps it didnt make the news in Ukraine, thats understandable. But then something odd happens; Manchester and football are mentioned and Eugene tries to change the topic. Im sorry but there isnt a 13 year old boy on the planet who wouldnt then have mention Manchester United! FAIL. You can make up your own mind by talking with Eugene here (hint: try the Manchester and football trick, Eugene falls for it every time, and yes football is a big sport in Ukraine).

from The Universal Machine http://universal-machine.blogspot.com/

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Forget Turing the Lovelace Test Has a Better Shot at Spotting AI

I recently blogged about a chatbot, called Eugene Goostman, that was claimed to have passed Alan Turings famous measure of machine intelligence in June by posing as a Ukrainian teenager with questionable language skills. Motherboard notices that "the world went nuts for about an hour before realizing that the bot, far from having achieved human-level intelligence, was actually pretty dumb." This article proposes the Lovelace test for AI that demands an act of creativity from an AI rather than automated conversational skills - its an interesting idea and would be a good way of honouring Ada Lovelace.

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The Internet Is Failing The Website Preservation Test

I blogged a few months back about the increasing problem of dead links (known as link rot) on research web sites. Not surprisingly this problem is not isolated to academic websites. An article by Rob Miller in TechChrunch, called "The Internet Is Failing The Website Preservation Test," makes the case for a a digital Library of Congress to preserve and protect all of the content on the internet to counter this growing problem. Preserving the integrity of the web for posterity cannot he (and others) argue be left to content publishers or non-profits like the Internet Archives Wayback Machine or the British Librarys UK Web Archive. The web is such a vital information source to us all know it must be preserved for future historians.

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Computer fools scientists passes intelligence test

A computer program, called Eugene Goostman, that simulates a 13-year-old Ukrainian boy, has passed the Turing test at an event organised by the University of Reading. The test investigates whether people can discriminate between a computer or a human in a conversation. The experiment is based on Alan Turings test for machine intelligence, called the Turing Test, which he called The Imitation Game. This story has been very widely reported in the media by, for examp le The BBC and even The New Zealand Herald. Thanks to my colleague Mark Wilson, and others, for bringing this story to my attention.



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