Slashdot Mirror
Human vs Computer Intelligence
DrLudicrous writes "The NYTimes is running an article regarding tests devised to differentiate from human and computer intelligence. One example are captchas, which can consists of a picture of words, angled and superimposed. A human will be able to read past the superposition, while a computer will not, and thus fails the test. It also goes a bit into some of Turing's predictions of what computers would be like by the year 2000."
And furthermore, if what you need for the task at hand is a machine that behaves and thinks in every way just like a human being, then just hire a human being to do it.
It's the differences between computers and humans that make computers so damn useful. Tell a human to add up a list of 200 numbers and he'll likely take a long time, and get the wrong answer because humans suck at repetative boring tasks beyond the limit of their attention spans.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
Computers can be specifically programmed to solve puzzles such as a this...if a test arises that supposedly tests for "human" intelligence, humans can simply modify the code so that it can solve that sort of puzzle.
That's what Gary Kasparov was complaing about when he played against Deep Blue the first time...there was a whole team of IBM programmers modifying the code during the game to specifically counter Kasparov's playing style. It wasn't a reflection of machine intelligence, it was an example of human adaptation imposed upon Deep Blue.
I'll form my OWN solar system! With blackjack! And hookers!
The CAPTCHA website (how do you pronounce that, anyway) has a list of possible applications of CAPTCHA. The first mention is online polls, and recalls an event in 1999, when Slashdot (they use http://www.slashdot.com for some reason) had a poll for the best graduate CS curriculum. Carnegie-Mellon and MIT wrote competing poll-bots that stuffed the poll boxes. The point was supposed to be that a CAPTCHA would have prevented this. In my opinion, however, this was probably the most accurate Slashdot poll ever. Obviously, MIT wrote the better poll bot, since it stuffed more votes, and they didn't even start until somebody noticed that CMU was stuffing. Hence, the winner of the stuffing contest turned out to be the true winner of the poll.
Today's Sesame Street was brought to you by the number e.
In other words, can the computer detect the information in the same form that the human can? Can a human read a grocery store bar-code as easily as a computer? No. Can a human read one of those bit-boxes on the FedEx shipping label as easily as a computer? No. Can a human read the Tivo-data sent on the Discovery channel as easily as the computer? No. But none of those failures means the computer is more intelligent, just more capable of recognizing the information that is there.
Both the computer and the human can recognize "moon/parma", but intelligence comes into play when the human starts thinking of Drew Carey and humming the theme music. Intelligence is not just collecting information, it is doing something useful with that information.
I took the 'Stumpy' test - where it shows you six pictures and asks you to choose a word that describes them.
:)
Looks like their system is hosed right now because it showed me 4 pictures of horses, 1 of a cowboy, and one of a turtle.
When it asked:
What are these pictures of?
I answered "things"
apparently it didn't like my answer.
Funny thing though, the images are being pulled by image number from the getty images database. You could write a piece of software to lookup the images at getty, pull the keyword list (that getty assigns to all photos) and cross reference the list to get the answer.
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Then this got me thinking about the whole thing in general. My answer WAS correct. Reminds me of the Cheers episode where Cliff is on Jeopardy and answers the final Jeopardy question:
"Who are three people who have never been in my kitchen."
Not the answer they were looking for, but is it wrong?
I was being a smartass the other day while watching sesame street with my daughter. They had pictures of 4 animals and asked which one didn't belong.
kangaroo
rabbit
grasshopper
fish
they, of course, were looking for 'fish' - because the other three live on land or travel by hopping.
I popped up that the answer could be the kangaroo - because the other three are native to north america. Or it could be the grasshopper, as the only one with an exoskeleton.
My wife reminded me that it was a kid's show.
It comes down to the fact that if an strict mechanism is used to judge the answers (like a computer) it may not be able to handle legitimate answers from humans.
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Seems both the questioner and questionee need to be intelligent to participate.
"Asking if a computer can think is like asking if a submarine can swim"
Or how about the example of the AI chess players, who can play vastly better than the people who programmed them?