An Italian-designed robot has passed a non-verbal version of the Turing test

An Italian-designed robot has passed a non-verbal version of the Turing test. Researchers at IIT-Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (Italian Institute of Technology) in Genova’s iCub robot passed the test, which required the robot to respond to stimuli when controlled by a human and when being run by its AI programme. The research group, coordinated by Agnieszka Wykowska, head of IIT’s Social Cognition in Human-Robot Interaction lab found that people interacting with the robot were not able to tell whether the robot was human-controlled or pre-programmed. However, the robot was only programmed to mimic certain human responses like timing and accuracy. Wykowska and her team now hope to programme their robot to display more complex human behaviours. “The next steps of scientific investigation would be to design a more complex behaviour on the robot, to have a more elaborate interaction with the humans and see what specific parameters of that interaction are perceived as human-like or mechanical,” she explains.