NeXt Computers launches its first PC and programmes entering the Loebner Prize fool many of the human judges. All on today’s On This Day from TEST Huddle.
1988 – NeXt Computers launch its first Product
After leaving Apple, Steve Jobs, founded NeXt Computers. On this day in 1988, the company launches its first computer. The new PC features (retailing at a price of rice: $6,500 – $7,769) a 25MHz Motorola 68030 microprocessor, 8MB RAM, a 250MB optical disk drive, a math co-processor, a digital processor for real time sound, a fax modem, and a seventeen-inch monitor. The computer has brought in many innovations into the computing industry including an optical storage disk, and a built-in digital signal processor for voice recognition. The computer runs version 0.8 of the NEXTSTEP operating system, although a mature release (version 1.0) of the operating system won’t be released for another year. The computer will ultimately fail with NeXT Software Inc. being bought over by Apple in 1997.
2008 – Artificial Intelligence catches up on Humans
For the first time in the competitions history, every artificial conversational entity in the annual Loebner Prize competition at the University of Reading is mistaken for a human by at least one of the human judges. The winner of the 2008 Loebner Prize competition is a programme called Elbot created by Fred Roberts that fooled 25% of the human judges, The competition is a result of the Turing Test threshold set by 20th-century British mathematician, Alan Turing. During this Turing Test, the entrants compete in a series of five minute long, unrestricted conversations with human interrogators, each of which was attempting to determine whether they were conversing with a machine or person.
Images: Wikipedia
