The magazine MAQ September 2018 MAQ Magazine November 2018 | Page 174

South Korean professional Go player Lee Sedol loses

to Google’s artificial intelligence program, AlphaGo.

Lee Jin-man

Turing test

I TAKE an online test to see if I can tell whether a machine or human generated 20 abstract images. This one looks like the top of a human's pale face on a mauve slug crawling through a gloomy landscape: machine. This a slash of red falling through a

yellow sky to blue sea and a strip of green land: human. I realise I'm assuming the ones in which I see meaning are by humans; the others are by machine. I score 13/20 – barely better than chance – in this artistic version of a well-known concept in AI,

the Turing test, which measures whether an AI can pass as human. (The one I thought human? Machine.)