The project is expected to run for ten years or however long it takes to collect one billion nuggets of knowledge. Collecting common sense The Generic Artificial Consciousness project is the brainchild of researcher Chris McKinstry who wants to make computers think about the world like people do so that they become more useful. The test was first suggested by British mathematician Alan Turing as a way to check if a machine was intelligent. Turing thought a test for intelligence would be more useful than a definition that computers had to live up to. The test was intended to take the form of a conversation conducted via computer screens.
Judges have to decide whether they are chatting to a machine or a human.
A machine is judged to have passed the test, and be able to think, when the judges cannot distinguish between its responses and those of a real person. In 1990, the Turing Test stopped being theoretical with the creation of the Loebner Prize in which computer programs compete to see which one is most human-like. Tackling Turing McKinstry says the Turing Test is more an examination of human experience than it is a test of reasoning. But he adds that a computer that sees the world like we do and shares our knowledge of it is likely to be more useful than one that can think. With Gac he is attempting to create the computer that knows everything that people know about the world and can use it to reason.