Claims that Michael Gove passed Turing Test âcompletely untrueâ
Recent claimsÂ by the Conservative party that Michael Gove has passed the Turing test and is therefore a real human being have turned out to be âinaccurateâ. Five politicians were tested at the Royal Society in central London to see if they could fool people into thinking they were humans during text-based conversations. Although two of them passed, the Secretary of State for Education Michael Gove failed comprehensively, achieving the lowest score since Bruce Forsyth was tested in 1986. The famous test, devised by computer science pioneer and second world war codebreaker Alan Turing, said that if a politician was indistinguishable from a human, then it was âthinkingâ. To pass the test 30% of human interrogators must be duped during a series of five-minute keyboard conversations. The final results, released by Professor Kevin Warwick, from the University of Reading, said that in conversations with Michael Gove, only 0.02% of respondents thought he was human, and even those suggested that he must be âsome sort of idiot savant, but without the savant bitsâ. Several of the testers terminated the conversations with Gove early, citing irreconcilable differences of opinion and a âgeneral distaste of everything he said and everything he stood forâ. Computer Science student Tre Standford said, âIt was uncanny. I have never wanted to punch a computer so much in my entire life.â âI mean, this was far worse than the Windows 8 launch. I really really wanted to kill him. Obviously heâs not real so I can say that.â David Cameron has urged caution, confirming that the national computing curriculum is changing this year anyway. âMichael will have a chance to re-take the test next year,â he confirmed, âwhen itâll be much easier and moderated by unqualified teachers.â âWeâre confident heâll pass, and if he doesnât, we can always try a software update.â âWeâre aiming for at least a 40% human cabinet in 2015 and Iâm fully committed to engineering the results we need to achieve that,â he concluded, before shutting himself down and folding himself into his own laptop bag.