PORTLAND, Ore. -- Passing the Turing test--the holy grail of artificial intelligence (AI), whereby a human conversing with a computer can't tell it's not human--may now be possible in a limited way with the world's fastest supercomputer (IBM's Blue Gene), according to AI experts at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. RPI is aiming to pass AI's final exam this fall, by pairing the most powerful university-based supercomputing system in the world with a new multimedia group designing a holodeck, a la Star Trek.
"We are building a knowledge base that corresponds to all of the relevant background for our synthetic character--where he went to school, what his family is like, and so on," said Selmer Bringsjord, head of Rensselaer's Cognitive Science Department and leader of the research project. "We want to engineer, from the start, a full-blown intelligent character and converse with him in an interactive environment like the holodeck from Star Trek."

Currently, Bringsjord is stocking his synthetic character will all sorts of facts, figures, family trivia and personal beliefs gleaned from what he calls his "full-time guinea pig," a graduate student that has agreed to bare all for his synthetic doppelganger. The synthetic character will be able to converse with other human-controlled avatars about his educational and family history, his personal pastimes, and even his feelings and beliefs.

"This synthetic person based on our mathematical theory will carry on a conversation about himself, including his own mental states and the mental states of others," said Bringsjord. "Our artificial intelligence algorithm is now making this possible, but we need a supercomputer to get real-time performance."