The day we can't tell the difference between a human and robot just got a little bit closer. A Turing Test of sorts has been put to humans to see if they could differentiate between their fellow human and non-human combatants in a first-person shooter game. For the first time in the five years that the contest has run, humans couldn't tell the difference. The contest, conceived of and organized by Philip Hingston, Associate Professor of Computer Science at Edith Cowan University in Perth, Australia, puts human and computer players on the battlefields of the first-person shooter game UT2004. After a few rounds of combat, the humans have to decide which players are human and which are bots.

You are free to share this article under the Attribution 4.0 International license. U. TEXAS – AUSTIN (US) -- An artificially intelligent virtual gamer has won the BotPrize by convincing a panel of judges that it was more human-like than half of its human opponents. The competition was sponsored by 2K Games and was set inside the virtual world of "Unreal Tournament 2004," a first-person shooter video game. "The idea is to evaluate how we can make game bots, which are non-player characters (NPCs) controlled by AI algorithms, appear as human as possible," says Risto Miikkulainen, professor of computer science at the University of Texas at Austin. Miikkulainen created the bot, called the UT 2 game bot, with doctoral students Jacob Schrum and Igor Karpov.

Lauren Gillespie, Class of 2019, is a computer science and chemistry double major working alongside Assistant Professor of Math and Computer Science Jacob Schrum to create intelligent agents for video games. "I thought it was really interesting that Professor Schrum's ideas encompassed a lot of what I learned in biology," says Gillespie. Gillespie is one of few sophomores chosen to participate in SCOPE, and brings an interdisciplinary mindset to the research. "That's what made her stand out to me--that she has a broader interest in science in general, and that interdisciplinary thinking is really important in mixing biology and computer science," says Schrum. "So I have a student who isn't just good at programming, but also appreciates the bigger ideas behind this research."