On Saturday, Turkish police arrested and detained a potential college pupil who’s accused of creating an elaborate scheme to make use of AI and hidden gadgets to assist him cheat on an necessary entrance examination, stories Reuters and The Daily Mail.
The unnamed pupil is reportedly jailed pending trial after the incident, which passed off within the southwestern province of Isparta, the place the scholar was caught behaving suspiciously throughout the TYT. The TYT is a nationally held college aptitude examination that determines an individual’s eligibility to attend a college in Turkey—and dishonest on the high-stakes examination is a severe offense.
In keeping with police stories, the scholar used a digicam disguised as a shirt button, linked to AI software program through a “router” (presumably a mistranslation of a mobile modem) hidden within the sole of their shoe. The system labored by scanning the examination questions utilizing the button digicam, which then relayed the data to an unnamed AI mannequin. The software program generated the right solutions and recited them to the scholar by means of an earpiece.
A video launched by the Isparta police demonstrated how the dishonest system functioned. Within the video, a police officer scans a query, and the AI software program supplies the right reply by means of the earpiece.
Along with the scholar, Turkish police detained one other particular person for aiding the scholar throughout the examination. The police found a cell phone that would allegedly relay spoken sounds to the opposite particular person, permitting for two-way communication.
A historical past of calling on computer systems for assist
The current arrest remembers different makes an attempt to cheat utilizing wi-fi communications and computer systems, such because the well-known case of the Eudaemons within the late Seventies. The Eudaemons had been a gaggle of physics graduate college students from the College of California, Santa Cruz, who developed a wearable laptop system designed to foretell the end result of roulette spins in casinos.
The Eudaemons’ system consisted of a shoe with a pc constructed into it, linked to a timing system operated by the wearer’s large toe. The wearer would click on the timer when the ball and the spinning roulette wheel had been in a selected place, and the pc would calculate the almost definitely part of the wheel the place the ball would land. This prediction could be transmitted to an earpiece worn by one other workforce member, who would shortly place bets on the expected part.
Whereas the Eudaemons’ plan did not contain a college examination, it exhibits that the urge to name upon distant computational powers larger than oneself is seemingly timeless.