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See Asimov's "Profession", 1957.

Alan Turing believed in esp. From http://www.abelard.org/turpap/turpap.php#the_argument_from_extra-sensory_perception:

I assume that the reader is familiar with the idea of extra-sensory perception, and the meaning of the four items of it, viz. telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition and psycho-kinesis. These disturbing phenomena seem to deny all our usual scientific ideas. How we should like to discredit them! Unfortunately the statistical evidence, at least for telepathy, is overwhelming. It is very difficult to rearrange one's ideas so as to fit these new facts in. Once one has accepted them it does not seem a very big step to believe in ghosts and bogies. The idea that our bodies move simply according to the known laws of physics, together with some others not yet discovered but somewhat similar, would be one of the first to go.

This argument is to my mind quite a strong one. One can say in reply that many scientific theories seem to remain workable in practice, in spite of clashing with E.S.P.; that in fact one can get along very nicely if one forgets about it. This is rather cold comfort, and one fears that thinking is just the kind of phenomenon where E.S.P. may be especially relevant.

stare him directly in the eyes and, in an outrageous French accent, curtly state "MIND YOUR OWN BUSINESS!"

Why a French accents?

Do Gands speak French or what?

(The above link is the original source of "MYOB".)

On education and "complex skills" http://www.abelard.org/asimov.php

so many babies, or such babies? 50% of people...are by definition below average intelligence.

Possibly more. 50% assumes a perfect normal distribution. This may not be the case.

Poul Anderson - High Crusade, Ens Flandry, Nick van R....
Lloyd Biggle, Jr - Monument was his peak, but anything he wrote is worthy of picking up
James Blish - Cities In Flight, short stories
James Hogan - enjoy
Donald Kingsbury - The Moon Goddess and the Son and Psychohistorical Crisis
John Myers Myers - Silverlock, a classic
Chris Moore - Hunter S. Thompson craziness in contemporary world. Find, read, laugh
Jerry Pournelle - tells a good yarn, A Spaceship for the King / King David's Spaceship
Tom Reamy - San Diego Lightfoot Sue, Blind Voices
Eric Frank Russell - everything ,but And Then There Were None is a personal favorite
Fred Saberhagen - An Old Friend of the Family (and sequels) and Berserker stories
George R Stewart - Earth Abides, this novel defines the post apocalypse genre
Roger Zelazny - The first 3 Amber books, Jack of Shadows, Lord of Light

Profession, Isaac Asimov, July 1957

Full text (But the design of the site... the googles do nothing!)

-Ster

Yeah, I'd like to read the transcripts from the competition, if any are available. If humans have tried to fool the judges into thinking they are machines or have just made small talk without any objective, then the test is flawed. The test as described by Turing is that the computer (A) has to fool the judge into thinking it's human, but the human (B) has to *help* the judge in making the good decision. I think we are still far away from seeing a computer win the Imitation Game if this rule is respected.

Worst? You can't handle the worst! content by a semi-literate monkey; design by a dyslexic chameleon

"Profession" by Isaac Asimov

It's a story about a society in which you're assigned jobs based on the structure of your brain, and how it can be 'educated'. It's a good story, with the moral being on free thought and being able to learn and innovate.

It's also quite relevant to the article.

Here's Turing's paper: http://www.abelard.org/turpap/turpap.php

Turing didn't describe the test very rigorously, but he also didn't put any sorts of limits on it, aside from the one that all interaction should take place through text and that the human subject in the test should be trying to help the interrogator get the right answer. The "traditional" test isn't. Most of the contest style implementations stem from Turing's statement:

I believe that in about fifty years time it will be possible to programme computers with a storage capacity of about 10^9 to make them play the imitation game so well that an average interrogator will not have more than 70 per cent chance of making the right identification after five minutes of questioning."

That statement of belief, separated by half the paper from the description of the test, doesn't in any way suggest that five minutes and a 30% success rate should be considered proof of intelligence, just that Turing believed that would be the state of progress by a certain time.

So by the "rules" I mean Turing's actual description of the "imitation game." Very few rules indeed. Yes, I picked extreme examples. It doesn't take anything like that to trip up any chatbot ever made. I tried all the ones that supposedly were "within a cycle of passing" this round and ALL of them started spitting out nonsense either on the first response or the second.

1. I agree, with a clarification. The scope of the Loebner "Turing test" is not sufficient. I suggest that the Turing test, by Turing's rules (or lack thereof) is the best test yet proposed for "intelligence."

2. The Turing test is a test for human equivalent intelligence. It's not the Turing test's fault if you let failure to achieve the ultimate goal distract you from other successful developments.

3. Tricks like inserting typos won't fool a reasonable interrogator, and won't be rewarded consistently. The Turing test, generalized, is a method for determining whether something possesses a quality that we have trouble defining. If you can come up with a good, rigorous definition of "intelligence" that we can all agree with, then we'll use that instead. In the meantime we don't have anything better than comparing our creations to a gold standard - us.

4. The design of the Turing test encourages programmers to focus on cognitive ability, rather than focusing on the interface. If a more complex interface is necessary to train the machine then programmers are free to create it. Turing himself discusses at length machines that can learn and how they might be educated:

It will not be possible to apply exactly the same teaching process to the machine as to a normal child. It will not, for instance, be provided with legs, so that it could not be asked to go out and fill the coal scuttle. Possibly it might not have eyes. But however well these deficiencies might be overcome by clever engineering, one could not send the creature to school with out the other children making excessive fun of it. It must be given some tuition. We need not be too concerned about the legs, eyes, etc. The example of Miss Helen Keller shows that education can take place provided that communication in both directions between teacher and pupil can take place by some means or other.

Alan Turing, in his 1950 paper Computing machinery and intelligence, where he discusses the question of whether machines can think, and where he introduces the Turing Test, says (section 7):

Estimates of the storage capacity of the brain vary from 10^10 to 10^15 binary digits. I incline to the lower values and believe that only a very small fraction is used for the higher types of thinking. Most of it is probably used for the retention of visual impressions. I should be surprised if more than 10^9 was required for [a computer to pass the Turing Test], at any rate against a blind man.

10^10 bits is 1.25 gigabytes, 10^15 bits is 125 terabytes. The former seems ridiculously small to me too, the latter would equate to 82kB/second, based on your calculation. Now would that be enough, you think?

I'm not even sure the question makes a lot of sense, actually. I don't picture the human memory as a discrete one (Turing discusses this too in his article, BTW), where information can be measured in terms of how many "storage units" it uses. I don't think a single memory, say the smell of my friend's uncle's basement when we were kids, could be extracted from my brain, taken out of any context, and measured to find out how many "bits" it uses.

The problem would also be, obviously, that we don't know how to represent all this data in binary form. Which "format" do you use? AI researchers have been trying to build ontologies that cover all of knowledge, computational linguists try to build grammars that fully describe a language, and both goals are mostly unattained yet.

Turing goes on to quote:

The capacity of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th edition, is 2 x 10^9

So he estimates that the human brain holds less information than an encyclopedia. I find that hard to believe. The encyclopedia sure holds more facts than I'll ever remember, but how about habits, skills, things I could never fully describe into words, but that I undoubtedly hold in memory?

It should also be kept in mind that in Turing's time there were no compilers, and programmers like him actually coded by manipulating bit sequences. So no wonder estimating the size of such large databases was hard for them.

Anyway Turing's paper is a rather fascinating read, I highly recommend it to any programmer or CS student.

So what IS the cost, per barrel, of pulling it out of the ground?

At current oil prices:

I think it's around five to six barrels of oil for each barrel of oil energy equivalent at the moment worldwide - meaning a lower bound of about $20 on average.

In the US, according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EROEI it's closer to 3:1 making a lower bound of around $33.

http://www.abelard.org/briefings/energy-economics.asp says tar sands are around 3:2 making a lower bound of around $66 (Note I have no idea of the reliability of that site - It was just the first hit on google on a search for "EROEI tar sands")

Tim.

This is mysticism. Don't kid yourself. It's right up there alongside The Secret, intelligent design and Jesus-my-invisible-friend. You think there's something a human can do that a machine won't eventually be able to? Well, all you need do is answer the question "why?". There's no reason to think a sufficiently advanced form of machine won't be affected by mood or physical state. Nor to think such a machine wouldn't vary its performance according to interaction, feedback, the audience, etc. So, even live "artificially produced" music will eventually be perfected.

A human is neurons, electricity, and stinking, heaving, leaking meat. To think there's some undefined organ that makes us special and above petty machinery is religious, irrational - hell, it's damned dualist bullshit we should have grown out of a few hundred years ago.

I recommend a stiff dose of Turing.

This reminds me of Isaac Asimov's story Profession. In the story, people are educated for their careers via direct mind transfer, but someone has to write the tapes to educate everyone else, when paradigms and techniques change. The parallels are clear.

Once again, I am reminded of Asimov's novel "Profession".

http://www.abelard.org/asimov.htm

That site is as visually noisy as I have ever seen. Apart from that, it's a very good story.

Right tail of raw scores is approximately log-normal or Pearson type IV- the higher you go the more the proportion of scorers is greater than the normal ditribution would predict.

http://sweb.uky.edu/~jcscov0/ratioiq.htm
http://www.abelard.org/burt/burt-ie.asp

Searle describes a scenario in which a person is isolated in a room. The individual receives pieces of paper marked with Chinese characters from under the door. Even though the person does not understand Chinese, if there is a formal sorting process for the characters then they can be filed into a meaningful order.

I think I was twelve when I heard that loud music could damage my hearing. I believed it too after an album side played at high volume.

That ringing in your ears when the music stops? That's temporary hearing loss. Listen to enough loud music/sounds and you will have that ringing all the time. Just ask Pete Townsend and Bill Clinton.

I am happy that I never went to many concerts. I've been to a few. Never sat up close. My cat is almost never too quiet for me to hear him getting into stuff - from my bedroom. Although the cat tries.

I would label this complaint as idiocy. Put it right up there with the woman who spilled hot coffee on herself and sued (yes that is not a good, 100 percent comparison, but RTFA before slamming me, please). Perhaps this is more like smokers who die from complications of smoking and their families sue. Did they ever really encourage their deceased loved one from smoking? Did the smoker ever really try to quit? As a former smoker myself I realize it can be very hard to quit but it can be done.

Some people like pain. I don't. If something I like hurts me I try and change something about it so it doesn't hurt or quit it.

Idiots. Idiots all around. They can be identified when they utter: I knew it would hurt/be wrong and I did it anyway and refuse to deal with the consequences.

Yes, we have tools to "don't need to get under the hood" (as you say) but if all programmers use this tools... What happens if we need a better STL? Sorry, nobody knows how to do it 'cause nobody knows how to "get under the hood". If all programmers use this tools and don't know how it works programming will become black magic (dark magic if you prefer).

Read Isaac Asimov's "Profession". He explains it better.

Well I haven't read the list (come on this is /. after all !) but I bet it doesn't contain my favourite namely "The Great Explosion" (which is actually a fleshed out version of "And Then There Were None") by Eric Frank Russell.

Absolutely brilliant bit of work and you can even read the shorter version online. Best link I can come up with at the moment is at abelard.org although I did once find a less "garish" (i.e. ad free) version which I now can't seem to track down.

Ah... if only more people had the sense to live like this :)

It's a good thing he's not pushing it too hard or I might find myself saying crazy things like "I agree with Bush"

At one tyme I was against nuclear power, mostly for two reasons. One is the possibility of accidents and the other is storage of the waste. However new reactor designs, such as the fast breeder reactor designs India uses or those that use pellets or pebbles are safer. There's still the problem with the waste however I heard some of the new designs produce little waste. If they can get rid of the waste then I'd be all for nuclear power. It certainly shouldn't be stored at Yucca Mountain. For one thing it's been shown Water can travel miles from there, and the other thing is that Yucca is an earthquake prone area. Some buildings were damaged there in an earthquake.

Also the government needs to stop subsidizing and shielding the industry. But if they did then nuclear power wouldn't be profitable.

Thanks for the link. But I'm courious as to where you got the "16 million metric tonnes per day". One site has U.S. emissions of 19.53 tons per capita per year. This site says Australia is the second greatest emitter of carbon dioxide per head in the world, surpassed only by the U.S. Australians averaged just over 18 tonnes of CO2 per head in year 2000, compared with 20.5 for the average American. Meanwhile this page lists Total anthropogenic CO2 as 8 billion tonnes for 2004, which is half of your daily number. With a world population of 6 billion that comes out to 1 1/3 tonnes per year.

Pah! That's nothing on this dish of angry fruit salad.

I found some stuff. Apparently the study was done by a guy named John B Calhoun. Rats were allowed to breed un-checked in a limited area with infinte food.

http://www.abelard.org/feedback.htm (a little after the middle of the page)

Also, this: http://www.abelard.org/briefings/global_warming.ht m#temperatures

See this too:

• during 1901 - 2000 sea level rose: 9 cm (4 inches)
• a predicted sea level rise for 2001 - 2100: 9 to 88 cm (4 to 40 inches). There is a considerable range of future estimates.
• if the Greenland ice sheet melted, add 6.75 metres (25 ft)
• if the West Antarctic ice sheet melted, add 4.3 metres (16 feet).
• The melting of these ice sheets would be enough to flood Florida and Bangladesh.

Gift economy, eh. As in the SF story "And Then There Were None" by Eric Frank Russell http://www.abelard.org/e-f-russell.htm. Great story, one of my favorites.

Lost colony with a planet-wide, what you call, gift economy. Anyone can get anything for an "ob" or obligation. They have buiit-in cultural checks, where if you start taking and don't pay back (or forward) your obligations, people are free not to give you things. Eventually you can't get food, housing, clothes or anything else and die alone in the wilderness.

Yes it is an economy with favors or in place of paper (or metal or whatever) currency, but in the story it worked just as well as any other type and it functioned on a more personal level. It also had a beneficial side effect of no despotic government, no big government, in fact no government at all.

I don't know that it would ever be possible to construct a working society based on this without a complete break with the old, as was done by being a lost colony, but it made a thought-provoking story. Read it.

Actually the only thing that kept the economy going while there was still a gold standard was its constituents belief in gold. You can't eat gold, it's generally a bad material for tools (too heavy, not hard enough) the only reason it's valuable is that it's always been valuable. (and that it doesn't decay)

http://www.abelard.org/e-f-russell.htm

The unholy alliance of lazy large busineses looking for replaceable cogs and schools willing to crank them out is what we have these days. Unfortunately people trained to be good little cogs don't do great things. Bill Gates for example is not a good little cog. Bill doesn't have a CME either, I bet.

Bar-room bores and opiniated halfwits.

In a recent paper Alonzo Church[2] has introduced an idea of "effective calculability", which is equivalent to my "computability", but is very differently defined. Church also reaches similar conclusions about the Entscheidungsproblem.[3] The proof of equivalence between "computability" and "effective calculability" is outlined in an appendix to the present paper.

In other countries, however, including western countries like Germany and France, freedom of expression is non-existant -- you may only say what the government allows you to say. In the two countries I've mentioned, it's not much of a problem, because they've basically only banned racist expressions. (emphasis mine)

Now I would not state that I live in a state as described by Eric Frank Russell, quote: "Anarchy in action - an excellent model of an anarchist or free society", but still - a little more precision might be appropriate (even on /. where there presumably are also some who are responsible for all the fine documentation ... erm). .

According to the Worldwide press freedom index (yes, of course it is biased, yes, the social sciences are fuzzy, blahh...) Germany ranks 7, the US comes in at 17 (France is at 11).

CC.

To alter the program sequence, the machine had to be modified.
Hmm, no. See, e.g., the discussion of Zuse's architecture vs. v. Neumann's. And the Turing machine, as described in Turing's famous 1936 paper "On Computable numbers", of course, needs just an infinite tape to "calculate any recursive function, decide any recursive language, and accept any recursively enumerable language. According to the Church-Turing thesis, the problems solvable by a universal Turing machine are exactly those problems solvable by an algorithm or an effective method of computation, for any reasonable definition of those terms." (From wikipedia) Aiken's Harvard architecture differs from the v. Neumann architecture mainly by having code storage separate from data storage (which, btw, is what modern processors implement in the L1 cache...)

Turing's famous 1950 paper Link missing from previous post.

However, it seems that there's some confusion in this thread between "Turing Machine" (described in the famous 1936 paper) and the so-called "Turing Test" (described in the famous 1950 paper). The 1950 paper discussed machine intelligence, and Turing had the ingenious idea of replacing the (vague and contentious) question "Can Machines Think?" with the (less vague) question "Can a Machine win the 'Imitation Game'?" It's possible (given the dates) that Turing knew of Asimov's story, and that the idea for the 'Imitation Game' came from it.

...as DVD country codes and the various "disposible" digital cameras whose contents have been analysed and the results posted here on a regular basis, right?

How many times did we hear rumours of pay-per-run services being the wave of the future in the last 10 years? But the best way to keep this from being adopted, is for us as the consumers to boycott such products in the stores and for us as the voters to remember what democratically elected individual supported the adoption of the DMCA-like laws required to back it up.

F-IW...ank

"On computable numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem"" is unarguably the paper that began the field of computer science as we understand it today. Here we have the first descriptions of universal computing devices, Turing machines, which eventually led to the idea of universal stored-program digital computers. The paper even seems to describe, in what is unarguably the first ever conceptual programming language, a form of continuation passing style in the form of the "skeleton tables" Turing used to abbreviate his Turing machine designs. It's also relatively easy reading compared to many other scientific papers I've seen.

Along with this we might also include Alonzo Church's 1941 paper "The Calculi of Lambda Abstraction" (which sadly does not appear to be anywhere online), where the lambda calculus, the basis for all functional programming languages, is first described.

Nope, it's still under copyright-- but it is already on the Web with permission of the London Mathematical Society!

On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem

Q: Add 34957 to 70764

A: (Pause about 30 seconds and then give as answer) 105621.

If you do the math you can see that the computer fucked up the addition, as well as taking an absurdly long time (for a computer) to do it.

You're not looking for the right answer, you're looking for the human answer. Any question is fair game. Read the paper here

Turing. Alan Mathison Turing. And here is a link.

Not to mention the fact that Americans INVENTED THE COMPUTER

Oh? When was this?

Well, once you have a language that is Turing-complete, it can do anything that any other Turing-complete language can do. Basic theorem of computer science (in the sense as a field of mathematics). And there aren't any languages (that I know of anyway) that are more than that...

.. and why not? Because if it's turing complete it can by definition (give or take the limitations of finite memory) compute all computable functions, and as uncomputable functions are uncomputable, there aren't any programming languages which allow you to compute them. You need to read up on the Entscheidungsproblem.

"Finally, we wish to exclude from the machines men born in the usual manner. It is difficult to frame the definitions so as to satisfy these three conditions. One might for instance insist that the team of {p.436} engineers should be all of one sex, but this would not really be satisfactory, for it is probably possible to rear a complete individual from a single cell of the skin (say) of a man. To do so would be a feat of biological technique deserving of the very highest praise, but we would not be inclined to regard it as a case of 'constructing a thinking machine'. This prompts us to abandon the requirement that every kind of technique should be permitted. We are the more ready to do so in view of the fact that the present interest in 'thinking machines' has been aroused by a particular kind of machine, usually called an 'electronic computer' or 'digital computer'. Following this suggestion we only permit digital computers to take part in our game."

Read the entire essay here

What would really be interesting if each individual could get a unique digital signature and hence mint his own "digi-cash". The "digi-cash" would work simply as IOU's. How to enforce them is a totally diff problem...the idea is basically from the story And then there were none by Eric Frank Russel. An interesting read anyways.

You learned about Turing from a Gibson novel? Is this a troll? I am suddenly overcome by a strange and unusual desire to yell something that usually confronts newbies in #linux on undernet when they want help installing Mandrake.

But I will resist it. I don't know what you mean by "the subject," so I'll try different angles.

For a biography, try Hodges' Alan Turing: The Enigma. I've not read it myself, but it has been very well received.

For an intro to some of his most influential ideas, try Introduction to the Theory of Computation by Sipser (the easiest book on the subject I've come across, but might be too hard anyway if you have no background in math or CS).

For his ideas on AI, see his original paper from 1950, which is now since long available online.

Also, you could just do a Google search (and should! Resorting to this kind of off topic questions is usually only defensible when finding information is hard).

It's hard to map anything well to the issue at hand. I made that point in there somewhere.

Your example isn't really much better, it's still entirely artificial, and the mapping isn't particularly clear either. In particular, are you trying to map doing violence or being jailed to being redistributed in a closed-source fashion?

Why is Sun allowed to distribute a 'proprietary program' in their own big organisation without opening the code

I don't know. Probably it wasn't strictly intended, and just springs from the funny "a corporation is equivalent a person for legal purposes" system we have here. Go ask RMS, he can tell you.

What is inherently wrong with keeping your game's source closed so that less hacks will be developed (securing it through other means than obfuscation is sometimes impossible)?

If you want to do that, don't use the GPL. It's that simple. The GPL is the wrong tool for that job.

So why would you want to decide for someone else that these things should not be possible with the code you give away?

Because you want people who use your code to give you the opportunity to use their code in return? The model seems to me something like this story, except we can't easily just stop providing 'scratcher' with code with the current methods of giving it away, so we take advantage of copyright law's prohibition of the use and only give the necessary permission as long as the recipient doesn't scratch.

PS2. Gratis comes from latin.

Libre probably does too. French and Spanish are both Romance languages derived from Latin, so it's not surprising they share the words. As for whether the person who first came up with using those words to help clarify 'free' versus 'free' was intending Latin, Spanish, French, or another language, i have no idea.

In actuality, Alan Turing said "If a person was unable to tell the difference between a conversation with a machine and a human, then the machine could reasonably be described as intelligent." This is a very basic description of the Turing test, which is a measure of the level of artificial intelligence of a computer system.

The Artificial Intelligence Enterprises located in Tel Aviv are working on a computer system, which they hope will be able to be mistaken for a 5-year-old child. They claim to have made a breakthrough. It is just a short step from a 5-year-old child to a thinking adult. In addition, you must consider mental illness and even the potential for envy, greed, rage, and hatred once you reach that plateau

You can find more AI news at The Mining Co AI pages

AI is a much broader term. "Intelligence", in this sense, simply means problem solving ability. Old-school AI - expert systems, minimax algorithms, theorem provers, and the like - tries to mimic abstract reasoning. New-school AI - then work of folks like Rodney Brooks - asks how biological organisms interact with their environment to get things done and tries to apply that to robots and computer systems.

Expert systems are type of old-school AI - so no foul in calling this AI.