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Turing Test Competition At CalTech
Charles Dodgeson writes "The Turing Tournament at Cal Tech wants to
know if you
can program an emulator that will play games like a
human, or if can you write detector that can correctly sort the wetware from the software.
Before you get too excited, the "games" are very limited things. But there is a $10,000 prize for the winner. You can read the gory
details."
FP! DV!
Exactly how not needed do we want to make actual people?
Searching for AOL, VB, Bonzi, etc in a binary could easily detect if it is wetware or not. Nothing without those keywords can afford to force out competitors for a profit!
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
"[The competition] is about as productive as promoting biology by offering a prize to the designer of the most convincing silk flower..." - Steven Pinker
What does this contribute to the field?
Would someone please translate this to something than can be parsed by non-math types?
We're just trying give the humans more time to play tetris
Jason
ProfQuotes
Just make it run around shooting stuff and saying things like "lol u camping fagot!!!!" ;)
Oh, and "my new vidcadr r0x ur world".
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
According to The Jargon Dictionary wetware is:
/wet'weir/ n. [prob. from the novels of Rudy Rucker] 1. The human nervous system, as opposed to computer hardware or software. "Wetware has 7 plus or minus 2 temporary registers." 2. Human beings (programmers, operators, administrators) attached to a computer system, as opposed to the system's hardware or software. See liveware, meatware.
wetware
I didn't know what it meant... figured other people may not either.
sig.
its "caltech" NOT "Cal Tech"
So I guess that if you can't understand their algebra in the 2nd part of the explanation, you aren't elible to join..maybe some /.'er could translate that for those of us who haven't graduated grade school yet?
At least the war on the environment is going well
Linux Linux ^pointer^ X X GNU X T T Linux EOF end of tape
Stuff a cock in your mouth you slashcock loving hippie faggots. Slashdot sucks, so does linux. Lose some weight you fat faggot fucks.
Hang on..so the TT wants me to write something that will play a very limited game in a very limited way? Is that it?
Sounds pretty damn easy to me!
Well! Never mind, then.
Fight with computer brings SWAT team
...if you can program an emulator that will play games like a human...
What? You mean make a bot to miss every shot using the railgun in Quake 3? I think I can whip up some AI for ya!
It's "Caltech", no intercaps, not "Cal Tech", or "CalTech" or whatever other odd spelling that the press came up with last week because no-one pays attention. "Caltech."
Sorry; it's a relative minor gripe from an ex-Lloydie...
"The Turing Tournament is a two sided tournament designed to find, on the one hand, the best computer programs to mimic human behavior"
:-)
humanator2()
{
while (sex=="false")
for (0:ii:4294967296) {
if (ii mod 100!=0) {
call dwnld_porn(kiddie);
else
call mstrbte();
end;
ii++;
}
}
Note the function requires no parameters...and eventually self-destructs
-Chris
--an unbreakable toy is useful for breaking other toys--
From the site:
... ... ...
:-(
An emulator is computer program that takes as input a stage game file, and gives as output a dataset file.
The input file is in the file game.nfg, and the output file should be written in the file dataset.txt, both of which should reside in the same directory as the executable program. Note that the file game.nfg will be written into each emulator's directory by the tournament program prior to running your emulator.
This is exactly the way ACM ICPC contests are conducted, except that if the systems crash for any reason, you're not given extra time to make up for it
And sadly, from the site:
Languages supported:
The computer program that you submit (for either an emulator or a detector) must be written in a combination of one or more of the following languages:
C or C++
java
Perl
Mathematica
Gambit GCL
I would have expected them to atleast add shell-scripting to this - very useful under such conditions to do some Q&D work, or would be taken for granted that since the shell can be a part of the OS, you are free to use it?
Also, would have been nice if they'd added Python to the list, and more importantly Forth (yes, despite what you've heard, Forth is indeed useful, just look at Arthur T Murray's Mind Project).
others have felt that way before
As someone who spent a lot of time working with an actual Turing Test bot, I'd just like to say that the term "Turing Test" really only applies to a "conversation" between computers and people, not emulating behavior in games, etc. I mean, when Turing wrote Computing Machinery and Intelligence, this isn't really what he envisioned to be a Turing Test.
From what I could gather, this is a lot closer to a programming tournament rather than a Turing Test...
I never understood this. Why would I want a computer that ridicules my hair, dress, and generally pathetic life? If I wanted that, I'd just get married!
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!
The rules are written in a very obscure minimalist fashion, so it took me a while to figure this out but: the game has not been defined! Your program is to get an input file and process it in a manner similar to a human. Currently the website is lacking examples of human output. Therefore, from an Information Theory perspective, we know absolutely nothing about the game.
Now, since I wasted my time figuring this out, I also decifered the instructions: basically the pool consists of a bunch of humans and "emulators" (programs). Each one is given a set of input files that they are supposed to transform into output files. Then the set of output files is run through a detector (human or machine?) that gives the participant some score. You win if your score is most like the humans' scores.
ummm so... metamod.pl is 404
A flash version of the game is available here for those too lazy to download.
Enjoy!
The Turing Test was developed by Alan Turing as one of his "free time endeavors." (I swear, that man had too much time on his hands.) Either way, the Turing Test has been the unsurpassed test for true AI and a human-wetware algorithm. The Turing Test dictates that only when a computer is fully capable of handling a conversation with a human, being able to respond to questions in logical, grammatically correct formats AND being able to learn new slangs and vocabularies - that is true AI (according to Turing). I think this CalTech game is about the same - it's not merely making a computer make mistakes and saying human-like taunts. It's truly.. being human. Those once-in-a-while lucky shots, beginner's luck, fresh leg advantages, the works. That's what they're looking for. Besides, it's CalTech. I think they deserve a little more credit than just merely modifying existing AI. =)
REM HUMAN V2.3
10 BUILD STUFF
20 WANT MORE STUFF
30 BUILD MORE STUFF
40 WANT STUFF YOU CANT HAVE
50 BUILD WEAPONS TO TAKE STUFF FROM WHO DOES HAVE
60 GAIN ENEMIES
70 BUILD BIGGER WEAPONS FOR DEFENSE
80 BUILD SUPER WEAPON
90 DESTROY SELVES
99 GOTO 10
--an unbreakable toy is useful for breaking other toys--
The Turing tournament is a two sided tournament designed to find, on the one hand, the best computer programs to mimic human behavior, and on the other hand, the best computer programs to detect the difference between machine and human behavior. Two types of submissions will be accepted: an emulator, which mimics human behavior, or a detector, which detects the difference between human and machine behavior.
So, I suppose we could say by evaluating the success of response (as would be weeded out by whomever *actually* turns out an entry), we will have achieved our research, VOILA! It's a successful research incentive, the prize that is.
Whaddya think? no? heck of a fight though wasn't it? :P
Correct answer:"Who cares!"
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Amazing. They are having an AI tournament, and their supported language list includes C, C++, Java, Perl, Mathematica, and something called the Gambit Command Language.
Where the hell are the good AI languages? Functional languages? Lisp? Scheme? Caml? SML? Hell, I'd settle for Python.
Justin Dubs
CHECK IT OUT\\\
http://buckland.resnet.gatech.edu/
HE KNOWS WHAT HES TALKIN ABOOT
The 1st annual Turing Tournament was held.
.
With 8 of the world's most lifelike AI programs. But . .
Mr. X, the sponsor of the tournament, took control of the programs and began to take over the world.
MegaEliza: Mr. X, how do you feel about why!?
Mr. X: It's time to tell you the truth. I have been manipulating that fool, DrBoy Neal from the beginning.
Mr. X: But now I no longer need DrBoy Neal's help. Come and face my power, MegaEliza!!
MegaEliza: How do you feel about me stopping you? Follow me, CmdrTaco!
Mega
Eliza
VI
> Press Start
Pass Word
(c) Slashcom 1993
Page sucks!
Oh, er, hmm. Sorry about that.
As part of a "branding" attempt after around WWII, California Institute of Technology refers to itself as "Caltech", not "Cal Tech".
See this Caltech Institute Archive.
Its been awhile sence I read about the subject, but isn't the Turing test just putting people in front of a terminal to talk to either a real person or a AI, and then asking which is the real person. When the same number of testers chose the AI as the real person, then the AI passes the test. Sence when did the Turing name apply to every AI competion? Am I wrong? This isn't a flame just a question about definitions...
Business News and Resources: www.usasource.net
isn't a game a simple form of communitation.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
You gave a link to a Puzzle Bobble clone. Though Slashdot recently ran an article about Snood, another Puzzle Bobble clone, this article is about a different game.
Was this post written by wetware or hardware?
In all seriousness, the Turing test is really old hat. We've had Eliza the shrink for years, hell, I remember in a CS class a story about an app that emulated a paranoid schitzophrenic(sp) that talked with Eliza.
We've passed the test. It doesn't really mean much as far as AI goes, what's the point? Emulation is NOT simulation. A parrot can emulate a human, that doesnt mean he thinks like one.
...Turing tests YOU!
In the ICPC, the set of available languages is restricted because the participants are using secured computers (to keep them from getting on the Net and causing trouble on the LAN). You'd think it wouldn't be a problem if participants could submit a binary compiled at home. However the whole point of this contest is for Caltech to see what ideas everyone else has come up with -- so they want to make sure they can read your source code.
you must have missed this node and possibly this one as well
Anyone know what happened to metamod.pl? It's 404 right now.
The guy of the post before me (I say guy because of the tone I got from the post, what? I can't use common sense anymore to form a deductive statement based on the US' political correctness? bs) had a good point of the other applications such a contest can provide value to.
I mean, maybe if you had tens of millions of dollars to analyze how humans do specific tasks compared to computers you might be able to code something up, but just guessing? I don't believe anyone can come up with solutions to this without doing huge amounts of research.
It's one thing to try to write a program that does things as well as humans, it's a whole other things like humans. And it's impossible without an operative definition of 'humanness'
Especially given that there is such a huge range of how 'well' people do things. I mean, some people are idiots, and some are geniuses. How can anyone write a program that can tell the difference between Deep Fritz and a grandmaster, and a program making lots of intentional errors and someone who doesn't know chess? And every class of player in between?
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
After reading the specs really quick, here comes a simplified summary of how the games work. Don't sue me if this is wrong, I did not look too carefully and it has been more than a year since I left Caltech.
Basically, the two players get to choose numbers with different pay-offs for themselves and the other player.
If you are short-sighted, it is easy to write an 'optimal' program, you always pick the max payoff for yourself.
However, you can also cooperate so that you maximize the average payoff for both players. Hopefully your opponent will realize this and also start picking numbers in this way, if not it is probably wise to go back and be short-sighted and selfish.
Now, the real object of this is to make (or detect) human-like opponents. I would guess that real human players are very irrational, for example they can get pissed if the other player is too selfish and then demand revenge, even though it does not maximize their own payoff.
Tor
Maybe it's just me, but "Before you get too excited" and "gory details" don't really match up with the heading "Turing Test Competition At CalTech".
Things that should have never been allowed to live: GCC "2.96" (really a CVS snapshot done by Redhat as they wanted something more up-to-date than the lovely 2.95.3). This means, that my code (which will probably be running using -Wall -Werror -ansi -pedantic), may/may not compile, depending on such things as the phases of the moon.
WTF is going on? Why are they using the broken gcc? Can the Caltech ppl who set this pass a Turing Test? I doubt it....
Beware the psychokinetic mimes!
The following is an example game file your program is supposed to output a dataset for that is "most human". I give you:
NFG 1 R "game1" { "1" "2" } { 2 2 }
21 3 3 5 3 5 5 3
What is the most human response? Anyone? Anyone?
sad /sad/ adj. 1. Bereft of happiness. 2. Human beings (programmers, operators, administrators) so attached to a computer system that their hardware will never encounter any wetware.
I dont know if this can take a slashdot, but...
http://www.strong.dk/girl.php
" 'the fuck? "
Cover your eyes and click this link!
If you'd read the article (even a little of it) you'd realize that the competition is not a Turing test at all. Unless, of course, you don't know what a Turing test is, in which case you certainly shouldn't be calling the concept "old hat".
old hat adj.
Behind the times; old-fashioned: Last year's styles will be old hat soon.
Overused; trite: That prank is old hat.
So -- exactly how is the Turing test "old hat" in any way? Being around a long time does not necessarily cause something to be less compelling or lose its usefulness (i.e. Fermat's Last Theorem).
Is it behind the times? If so, what's the modern AI test? C'mon, a better one please.
Is it trite? (Lemme help ya, just in case:)
trite adj. triter, tritest
Lacking power to evoke interest through overuse or repetition; hackneyed.
Archaic. Frayed or worn out by use.
If you think either of those apply, then you truly do not understand what a Turing test is.
everything in moderation
I don't think Caltech is the best place to determine what is "human" behavior.
Life at Caltech.
Also, notice that this contest is being held by the "Division of Humanities and Social Sciences".
Why I Am Not A Christian
... and Peter ... saith unto Him: 'Master, behold the fig tree which thou cursedst is withered away.'" This is a very curious story, because it was not the right time of year for figs, and you really could not blame the tree. I cannot myself feel that either in the matter of wisdom or in the matter of virtue Christ stands quite as high as some other people known to history. I think I should put Buddha and Socrates above Him in those respects.
by Bertrand Russell
March 6, 1927
National Secular Society, South London branch
Battersea Town Hall
As your chairman has told you, the subject about which I am to speak tonight is "Why I Am Not a Christian." Perhaps it would be as well, first of all, to try to make out what one means by the word "Christian." It is used these days in a very loose sense by a great many people. Some people mean no more by it than a person who attempts to live a good life. In that sense I suppose there would be Christians of all sects and creeds; but I do not think that is the proper sense of the word, if only because it would imply that all the people who are not Christians -- all the Buddhists, Confucians, Mohammedans, and so on -- are not trying to live a good life. I do not mean by a Christian any person who tries to live decently according to his lights. I think you must have a certain amount of definite belief before you have a right to call yourself a Christian. The word does not have quite such a full-blooded meaning now as it had in the times of St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas. In those days, if a man said that he was a Christian, it was known what he meant. You accepted a whole collection of creeds which were set out with great precision, and every single syllable of those creeds you believed with the whole strength of your convictions.
What Is A Christian?
Nowadays it is not quite that. We have to be a little more vague in our meaning of Christianity. I think, however, that there are two different items which are essential to anyone calling himself a Christian. The first is one of a dogmatic nature -- namely, that you must believe in God and immortality. If you do not believe in those two things, I do not think you can properly call yourself a Christian. Then, further than that, as the name implies, you must have some kind of belief about Christ. The Mohammedans, for instance, also believe in God and immortality, and yet they would not call themselves Christians. I think that you must have at the very lowest the belief that Christ was, if not divine, at least the best and very wisest of men. If you are not going to believe that much about Christ, I do not think you have any right to call yourself a Christian. Of course, there is another sense, which you find in "Whitaker's Almanack" and in geography books, where the population of the world is said to be divided into Christians, Mohammedans, Buddhists, fetish worshippers, and so on; but in that sense we are all Christians. The geography counts us all in, but that is a purely geographical sense, which I suppose we can ignore. Therefore I take it that when I tell you why I am not a Christian I have to tell you two different things: first, why I do not believe in God and in immortality; and, secondly, why I do not think that Christ was the very best and wisest of men, although I grant him a very high degree of moral goodness.
But for the successful efforts of unbelievers in the past, I could not take so elastic a definition of Christianity as that. As I said before, in the olden days it had a much more full-blooded sense. For instance, it included the belief in hell. Belief in eternal hell-fire was an essential item of Christian belief until pretty recent times. In this country, as you know, it ceased to be an essential item because of a decision of the Privy Council, and from that decision the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Archbishop of York dissented; but in this country our religion is settled by Act of Parliament, and therefore the Privy Council was able to override Their Graces and Hell was no longer necessary to a Christian. Consequently I shall not insist that a Christian must believe in hell.
The Existence Of God
To come to this question of the existence of God: it is a large and serious question, and if I were to attempt to deal with it in any adequate manner I should have to keep you here until Kingdom Come, so that you will have to excuse me if I deal with it in a somewhat summary fashion. You know, of course, that the Catholic Church has laid it down as dogma that the existence of God can be proved by the unaided reason. This is a somewhat curious dogma, but it is one of their dogmas. They had to introduce it because at one time the freethinkers adopted the habit of saying that there were such and such arguments which mere reason might urge against the existence of God, but of course they knew as a matter of faith that God did exist. The arguments and reasons were set out at great length, and the Catholic Church felt that they must stop it. Therefore they laid it down as dogma that the existence of God can be proved by the unaided reason and they had to set up what they considered were arguments to prove it.
The First Cause Argument
Perhaps the simplest and easiest to understand is the argument of the First Cause. (It is maintained that everything we see in the world has a cause, and as you go back in the chain of causes further and further you must come to a First Cause, and to that First Cause you give the name of God.) That argument, I suppose, does not carry much weight nowadays, because, in the first place, cause is not quite what it used to be. The philosophers and the men of science have got going on cause, and it has not anything like the vitality it used to have; but apart from that, you can see that the argument that there must be a First Cause is one that cannot have any validity. I may say that when I was a young man and was debating these questions very seriously in my mind, I for a long time accepted the argument of the First Cause, until one day, at the age of eighteen, I read John Stuart Mill's autobiography, and I there found this sentence: "My father taught me that the question 'Who made me?' cannot be answered, since it immediately suggests the further question "Who made god'" that very simple sentence showed me, as I still think, the fallacy in the argument of the First Cause. If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause. If there can be anything without a cause, it may just as well be the world as God, so that there cannot be any validity in that argument. It is exactly of the same nature as the Hindu's view, that the world rested upon an elephant, and the elephant rested upon a tortoise; and when they said, "How about the tortoise?" the Indian said, "Suppose we change the subject." The argument is really no better than that. There is no reason why the world could not have come into being without a cause; nor, on the other hand, is there any reason why it should not have always existed. There is no reason to suppose that the world had a beginning at all. The idea that things must have a beginning is really due to the poverty of our imagination. Therefore, perhaps, I need not waste any more time upon the argument about the First Cause.
The Natural-Law Argument
Then there is a very common argument from Natural Law. That was a favorite argument all through the eighteenth century, especially under the influence of Sir Isaac Newton and his cosmogony. People observed the planets going around the sun according to the law of gravitation, and the thought that God had given a behest to these planets to move in a particular fashion, and that was why they did so. That was, of course, a convenient and simple explanation that saved them the trouble of looking any further for any explanation of the law of gravitation. Nowadays we explain the law of gravitation in a somewhat complicated fashion that Einstein has introduced. I do not propose to give you a lecture on the law of gravitation, as interpreted by Einstein, because that again would take some time; at any rate, you no longer have the sort of Natural Law that you had in the Newtonian system, where, for some reason that nobody could understand, nature behaved in a uniform fashion. We now find that a great many things we thought were Natural Laws are really human conventions. You know that even in the remotest depth of stellar space there are still three feet to a yard. That is, no doubt, a very remarkable fact, but you would hardly call it a law of nature. And a great many things that have been regarded as laws of nature are of that kind. On the other hand, where you can get down to any knowledge of what atoms actually do, you will find they are much less subject to law than people thought, and the laws at which you arrive are statistical averages of just the sort that would emerge from chance. There is, as we all know, a law that says if you throw dice you will get double sixes only about once in thirty-six times, and we do not regard that as evidence to the contrary that the fall of the dice is regulated by design; on the contrary, if the double sixes came every time we should think that there was design. The laws of nature are of that sort as regards to a great many of them. They are statistical averages such as would emerge from the laws of chance; and that makes the whole business of natural law much less impressive than it formerly was. Quite apart from that, which represents the momentary state of science that may change tomorrow, the whole idea that natural laws imply a lawgiver is due to a confusion between natural and human laws. Human laws are behests commanding you to behave a certain way, in which you may choose to behave, or you may choose not to behave; but natural laws are a description of how things do in fact behave, and being a mere description of what they in fact do, you cannot argue that there must be supposedly someone who told them to do that, because even supposing there were, you are faced with the question, "Why did god issue just those and no others?" If you say that he did it simply from his own good pleasure, and without any reason, you then find that there is something which is not subject to law, and so your train of natural law is interrupted. If you say, as more orthodox theologians do, that in all the laws which God issues he had a reason for giving those laws rather than others -- the reason, of course, being to create the best universe, although you would never think it to look at it -- if there were a reason for the laws which God gave, then God himself was subject to law, and therefore you do not get any advantage by introducing God as an intermediary. You really have a law outside and anterior to the divine edicts, and God does not serve your purpose, as he is not the ultimate lawgiver. In short, this whole argument from natural law no longer has anything like the strength that it used to have. I am traveling on in time in my review of these arguments. The arguments that are used for the existence of God change their character as time goes on. They were at first hard intellectual arguments embodying certain quite definite fallacies. As we come to modern times they become less respectable intellectually and more and more affected by a kind of moralizing vagueness.
The Argument from Design
The next step in the process brings us to the argument from design. You all know the argument from design: everything in the world is made just so that we can manage to live in the world, and if the world was ever so little different, we could not manage to live in it. That is the argument from design. It sometimes takes a rather curious form; for instance, it is argued that rabbits have white tails in order to be easy to shoot. I do not know how rabbits would view that application. It is an easy argument to parody. You all know Voltaire's remark, that obviously the nose was designed to be such as to fit spectacles. That sort of parody has turned out to be not nearly so wide of the mark as it might have seemed in the eighteenth century, because since the time of Darwin we understand much better why living creatures are adapted to their environment. It is not that their environment was made to be suitable to them, but that they grew to be suitable to it, that is the basis of adaptation. There is no evidence of design about it.
When you come to look into this argument from design, it is a most astonishing thing that people can believe that this world, with all the things that are in it, with all its defects, should be the best that omnipotence and omniscience have been able to produce in millions of years. I really cannot believe it. Do you think that, if you were granted omnipotence and omniscience and millions of years in which to perfect your world, you could produce nothing better than the Ku Klux Klan or the fascists? Moreover, if you accept the ordinary laws of science, you have to suppose that human life and life in general on this planet will die out in due course: it is a stage in the decay of the solar system; at a certain stage of decay you get the sort of conditions and temperature and so forth which are suitable to protoplasm, and there is life for a short time in the life of the whole solar system. You see in the moon the sort of thing to which the earth is tending -- something dead, cold, and lifeless.
I am told that that sort of view is depressing, and people will sometimes tell you that if they believed that, they would not be able to go on living. Do not believe it; it is all nonsense. Nobody really worries about what is going to happen millions of years hence. Even if they think they are worrying much about that, they are really deceiving themselves. They are worried about something much more mundane, or it may merely be bad digestion; but nobody is really seriously rendered unhappy by the thought of something that is going to happen in this world millions and millions of years hence. Therefore, although it is of course a gloomy view to suppose that life will die out -- at least I suppose we may say so, although sometimes when I contemplate the things that people do with their lives I think it is almost a consolation -- it is not such as to render life miserable. It merely makes you turn your attention to other things.
The Moral Arguments for Deity
Now we reach one stage further in what I shall call the intellectual descent that the Theists have made in their argumentations, and we come to what are called moral arguments for the existence of God. You all know, of course, that there used to be in the old days three intellectual arguments for the existence of God, all of which were disposed of by Immanuel Kant in the "Critique of Pure Reason;" but no sooner had he disposed of those arguments than he invented a new one, a moral argument, and that quite convinced him. He was like many people: in intellectual matters he was skeptical, but in moral matters he believed implicitly in the maxims that he had imbibed at his mother's knee. That illustrates what the psychoanalysts so much emphasize -- the immensely stronger hold that our very early associations have than those of later times.
Kant, as I say, invented a new moral argument for the existence of God, and that in varying forms was extremely popular during the nineteenth century. it has all sorts of forms. One form is to say there would be no right and wrong unless god existed. I am not for the moment concerned with whether there is a difference between right and wrong, or whether there is not: that is another question. The point I am concerned with is that, if you are quite sure there is a difference between right and wrong, then you are in this situation: is that difference due to God's fiat or is it not? If it is due to God's fiat, then for God himself there is no difference between right and wrong, and it is no longer a significant statement to say that God is good. If you are going to say, as theologians do, that God is good, you must then say that right and wrong have some meaning which is independent of God's fiat, because God's fiats are good and not bad independently of the fact that he made them. If you are going to say that, you will have to say that it is not only through God that right and wrong came into being, but that they are in their essence logically anterior to God. you could, of course, if you liked, say that there was a superior deity who gave orders to the God that made this world, or could take up a line that some of the Gnostics took up -- a line which I often thought was a very plausible one -- that as a matter of fact this world that we know was made by the Devil at a moment when God was not looking. There is a good deal to be said for that, and I am not concerned to refute it.
The Argument for the Remedying of Injustice
Then there is another very curious form of moral argument, which is this: they say that the existence of God is required to bring justice into the world. In the part of the universe that we know there is a great injustice, and often the good suffer, and the often the wicked prosper, and one hardly knows which of those is more annoying; but if you are going to have justice in the universe as a whole you have to suppose a future life to redress the balance of life here on earth. So they say that there must be a God, and that there must be Heaven and Hell in order that in the long run there may be justice. That is a very curious argument. If you looked at the matter from a scientific point of view, you would say, "After all, I only know this world. I do not know about the rest of the universe, but so far as one can argue from probabilities one would say that probably this world is a fair sample, and if there is injustice here then the odds are great that there is injustice elsewhere also." Supposing you got a crate of oranges that you opened, and you found all the top layer of oranges bad, you would not argue, "The underneath ones must be good, so as to redress the balance." You would say, "Probably the whole lot is a bad consignment"; and that is really what a scientific person would argue about the universe. He would say, "Here we find in this world a great deal of injustice, and so far as that goes that is a reason for supposing that justice does not rule in this world, and therefore so far as it goes it supports a moral argument against deity and not in favor of one." Of course I know that the sort of intellectual arguments that I have been talking to you about is not really what moves people. What really moves people to believe in God is not any intellectual argument at all. Most people believe in God because they have been taught from early infancy to do it, and that is the main reason.
Then I think that the next most powerful reason is the wish for safety, a sort of feeling that there is a big brother who will look after you. That plays a very profound part in influencing people's desire for a belief in God.
The Character Of Christ
I now want to say a few words upon a topic which I often think is not quite sufficiently dealt with by rationalists, and that is the question whether Christ was the best and the wisest of men. It is generally taken for granted that we should all agree that that was so. I do not myself. I think that there are a good many points upon which I agree with Christ a great deal more than the professing Christians do. I do not know that I could go with Him all the way, but I could go with Him much further than most professing Christians can. You will remember that He said, "Resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also." That is not a new precept or a new principle. It was used by Lao-Tse and Buddha some 500 or 600 years before Christ, but it is not a principle which as a matter of fact Christians accept. I have no doubt that the present prime minister (Stanley Baldwin), for instance, is a most sincere Christian, but I should not advise any of you to go and smite him on one cheek. I think you might find that he thought this text was intended in a figurative sense.
Then there is another point which I consider excellent. You will remember that Christ said, "Judge not lest ye be judged." That principle I do not think you would find was very popular in the law courts of Christian countries. I have known in my time a number of judges who were very earnest Christians, and none of them felt that they were acting contrary to Christian principles in what they did. Then Christ says, "Give to him that asketh of thee, and from him that would borrow of thee turn thou not away." This is a very good principle. Your chairman has reminded you that we are not here to talk politics, but I cannot help observing that the last general election was fought on the question of how desirable it was to turn away from him that would borrow of thee, so that one must assume that the liberals and conservatives of this country are composed of people who do not agree with the teaching of Christ, because they certainly did not behave that way on that occasion.
Then there is one other maxim of Christ's teaching which I think has a great deal of good in it, but I do not find that it is very popular among some of our Christian friends. He says, "If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that which thou hast, and give to the poor." That is a very excellent maxim, but, as I say, it is not much practised. All these, I think, are good maxims, although they are a little difficult to live up to. I do not profess to live up to them myself; but then, after all, it is not quite the same thing as for a Christian.
Defects in Christ's Teaching
Having granted the excellence of these maxims, I come to certain points in which I do not believe that one can grant either the superlative wisdom or the superlative goodness of Christ as depicted in the Gospels; and here I may say that one is not concerned with the historical question. Historically, it is quite doubtful whether Christ ever existed at all, and if He did we do not know anything about him, so that I am not concerned with the historical question, which is a very difficult one. I am concerned with Christ as he appears in the Gospels, taking the Gospel narrative as it stands, and there one does find some things that do not seem to be very wise. For one thing, he certainly thought his second coming would occur in clouds of glory before the death of all the people who were living at that time. There are a great many texts that prove that. He says, for instance, "Ye shall not have gone over the cities of Israel till the Son of Man comes into his kingdom"; and there are a lot of places where it is quite clear that he believed his second coming would happen during the lifetime of many then living. That was the belief of his earlier followers, and it was the basis of a good deal of his moral teaching. When He said, "Take no thought for the morrow," and things of that sort, it was very largely because He thought the second coming was going to be very soon, and that all ordinary mundane affairs did not count. I have, as a matter of fact, known some Christians who did believe the second coming was imminent. I knew a parson who frightened his congregation terribly by telling them the second coming was very imminent indeed, but they were much consoled when they found that he was planting trees in his garden. The early Christians really did believe it, and they did abstain from such things as planting trees in their gardens, because they did accept from Christ the belief that the second coming was imminent. In this respect, clearly He was not so wise as some other people have been, and He certainly was not superlatively wise.
The Moral Problem
Then you come to moral questions. There is one very serious defect to my mind in Christ's moral character, and that is that He believed in Hell. I do not myself feel that any person that is really profoundly humane can believe in everlasting punishment. Christ certainly as depicted in the Gospels did believe in everlasting punishment, and one does find repeatedly a vindictive fury against those people who would not listen to His preaching -- an attitude which is not uncommon with preachers, but which does somewhat detract from superlative excellence. You do not, for instance, find that attitude in Socrates. You find him quite bland and urbane toward the people who would not listen to him; and it is, to my mind, far more worthy of a sage to take that line than to take the line of indignation. You probably all remember the sorts of things that Socrates was saying when he was dying, and the sort of things that he generally did say to people who did not agree with him.
You will find that in the Gospels Christ said, "Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of Hell." That was said to people who did not like His preaching. It is not really to my mind quite the best tone, and there are a great many of these things about Hell. There is, of course, the familiar text about the sin against the Holy Ghost: "Whosoever speaketh against the Holy Ghost it shall not be forgiven him neither in this world nor in the world to come." That text has caused an unspeakable amount of misery in the world, for all sorts of people have imagined that they have committed the sin against the Holy Ghost, and though that it would not be forgiven them either in this world or in the world to come. I really do not think that a person with a proper degree of kindliness in his nature would have put fears and terrors of this sort into the world.
Then Christ says, "The Son of Man shall send forth his His angels, and they shall gather out of His kingdom all things that offend, and them which do iniquity, and shall cast them into a furnace of fire; there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth"; and He goes on about the wailing and gnashing of teeth. It comes in one verse after another, and it is quite manifest to the reader that there is a certain pleasure in contemplating wailing and gnashing of teeth, or else it would not occur so often. Then you all, of course, remember about the sheep and the goats; how at the second coming He is going to divide the sheep from the goats, and He is going to say to the goats, "Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire." He continues, "And these shall go away into everlasting fire." Then He says again, "If thy hand offend thee, cut it off; it is better for thee to enter into life maimed, than having two hands to go into Hell, into the fire that shall never be quenched, where the worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched." He repeats that again and again also. I must say that I think all this doctrine, that hell-fire is a punishment for sin, is a doctrine of cruelty. It is a doctrine that put cruelty into the world, and gave the world generations of cruel torture; and the Christ of the Gospels, if you could take Him as his chroniclers represent Him, would certainly have to be considered partly responsible for that.
There are other things of less importance. There is the instance of the Gadarene swine, where it certainly was not very kind to the pigs to put the devils into them and make them rush down the hill into the sea. You must remember that He was omnipotent, and He could have made the devils simply go away; but He chose to send them into the pigs. Then there is the curious story of the fig tree, which has always rather puzzled me. You remember what happened about the fig tree. "He was hungry; and seeing a fig tree afar off having leaves, He came if haply He might find anything thereon; and when he came to it He found nothing but leaves, for the time of figs was not yet. And Jesus answered and said unto it: 'No man eat fruit of thee hereafter for ever'
The Emotional Factor
As I said before, I do not think that the real reason that people accept religion has anything to do with argumentation. They accept religion on emotional grounds. One is often told that it is a very wrong thing to do to attack religion, because religion makes men virtuous. So I am told; I have not noticed it. You know, of course, the parody of that argument in Samuel Butler's book, Erewhon Revisited. You will remember that in Erewhon there is a certain Higgs who arrives in a remote country, and after spending some time there he escapes from that country in a balloon. Twenty years later he comes back to that country and finds a new religion in which he is worshipped under the name of the "Sun Child," and it is said that he ascended into Heaven. He finds that the feast of the Ascension is about to be celebrated, and he hears Professors Hanky and Panky say to each other that they never set eyes on the man Higgs, and they hope they never will; but they are the High Priests of the religion of the Sun Child. He is very indignant, and he comes up to them, and he says, "I am going to expose all this humbug and tell the people of Erewhon that it was only I, the man Higgs, and I went up in a balloon." He was told, "You must not do that, because of all the morals of this country are bound round this myth, and if they once know that you did not ascend into Heaven they will all become wicked"; and so he is persuaded of that and he goes quietly away.
That is the idea -- that we should all be wicked if we did not hold to the Christian religion. It seems to me that the people who have held to it have been for the most part extremely wicked. You find this curious fact, that the more intense has been the religion of any period and the more profound has been the dogmatic belief, the greater has been the cruelty and the worse has been the state of affairs. In the so-called Ages of Faith, when men really did believe the Christian religion in all its completeness, there was the Inquisition, with all its tortures; there were millions of unfortunate women burned as witches; and there was every kind of cruelty practiced upon all sorts of people in the name of religion.
You find as you look around the world that every single bit of progress of humane feeling, every improvement in the criminal law, every step toward the diminution of war, every step toward better treatment of the colored races, or ever mitigation of slavery, every moral progress that there has been in the world, has been consistently opposed by the organized churches of the world. I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world.
How The Churches Have Retarded Progress
You may think that I am going too far when I say that that is still so, I do not think that I am. Take one fact. You will bear with me if I mention it. It is not a pleasant fact, but the churches compel one to mention facts that are not pleasant. Supposing that in this world that we live in today an inexperienced girl is married to a syphilitic man; in that case the Catholic Church says, "This is an indissoluble sacrament. You must endure celibacy or stay together. And if you stay together, you must not use birth control to prevent the birth of syphilitic children." Nobody whose natural sympathies have not been warped by dogma, or whose moral nature was not absolutely dead to all sense of suffering could maintain that it is right and proper that this state of things should continue.
That is only an example. There are a great many ways in which, at the present moment, the church, by its insistence upon what it chooses to call morality, inflicts upon all sorts of people undeserved and unnecessary suffering. And of course, as we know, it is in its major part an opponent still of progress and improvement in all the ways that diminish suffering in the world, because it has chosen to label as morality a certain narrow set of rules of conduct which have nothing to do with human happiness; and when you say that this or that ought to be done because it would make for human happiness, they think that has nothing to do with the matter at all. "What has human happiness to do with morals? The object of morals is not to make people happy."
Fear, The Foundation Of Religion
Religion is based, I think, primarily and mainly upon fear. It is partly the terror of the unknown and partly, as I have said, the wish to feel that you have a kind of elder brother who will stand by you in all your troubles and disputes. Fear is the basis of the whole thing -- fear of the mysterious, fear of defeat, fear of death. Fear is the parent of cruelty, and therefore it is no wonder if cruelty and religion have gone hand in hand. It is because fear is at the basis of those two things. In this world we can now begin a little to understand things, and a little to master them by the help of science, which has forced its way step by step against the Christian religion, against the churches, and against the opposition of all the old precepts. Science can help us to get over this craven fear in which mankind has lived for so many generations. Science can teach us, and I think our own hearts can teach us, no longer to look around for imaginary supports, no longer to invent allies in the sky, but rather to look to our own efforts here below to make this world a better place to live in, instead of the sort of place the churches in all these centuries have made it.
What We Must Do
We want to stand upon our own feet and look fair and square at the world -- its good facts, its bad facts, its beauties, and its ugliness; see the world as it is and be not afraid of it. Conquer the world by intelligence and not merely by being slavishly subdued by the terror that comes from it. The whole conception of a god is a conception derived from the ancient oriental despotisms. It is a conception quite unworthy of free men. When you hear people in church debasing themselves and saying that they are miserable sinners, and all the rest of it, it seems contemptible and not worthy of self-respecting human beings. We ought to stand up and look the world frankly in the face. We ought to make the best we can of the world, and if it is not so good as we wish, after all it will still be better than what these others have made of it in all these ages. A good world needs knowledge, kindliness, and courage; it does not need a regretful hankering after the past or a fettering of the free intelligence by the words uttered long ago by ignorant men. It needs a fearless outlook and a free intelligence. It needs hope for the future, not looking back all the time toward a past that is dead, which we trust will be far surpassed by the future that our intelligence can create.
They SHOULD have said:
The Turing Tournament at Cal Tech wants to distribute $20,000 of the school's funds to their 'internet friends', Caltech friends, and other IVY league schoolers whom they would explain the contest to in human terms.
The contest strives to limit the accessibility of other people by not using human terms whenever possible, and by making the contest information as uninteresting and hard to follow and understand as possible to regular internet visitors to keep the pool as low as possible.
This decreases the chance high school kids or other 2 and 4 year college students would know about this since their professors would not read the dready explanations that they would then have to interpret and explain to students, when the rules and explanations should have been obviously simple to understand already.
Since the attempt is clearly to have a small amount of entries, this makes the competition mostly garbage."
Seriously, their page says it was made with LaTeX2HTML, but they only wrote that because they seriously knew they wouldn't have fooled anyone with telling us the directions were written by a human.
Cover your eyes and click this link!
"Everything seems happier, there's all these new faces,"
You'd think you would have to know grammar to be in a school like Caltech...
Cover your eyes and click this link!
Prime numbers are exactly what Alan Greenspan says they are -S. Minsky
This 'contest' reminds of the scene in Ghostbusters where Bill Murray manipulates pre-cog cards to get women. Really, if a ESP buff were to present something like this to the Amazing Randi he would not accept it on the grounds that it was too easy to manipulate.
First and foremost, there is a large sum of money being bandied around. The participants are incented to win by monetary payouts, and two payouts of $10,000 dollars are at stake as well. When games with this high of stakes are being played, great caution is generally used by the house.
But look at the rules of the game...there basically are none. Participants are identified by e-mail address; no rule is specified about the number of entries per person. Also, no rule is specified about collusion between entrants (detectors and emulators). It doesn't take an einstein to figure out how to bias the results of the experient by making enough colluding entries. It is funny this, given that the games themselves are *about* collusion. Its a joke.
Next, notice that there really isnt any way for anybody to tell if the results of the experiement are meaningful, or if they have been manipulated. Its not based on a falsafible proposition and is not scientific. Its no different from any method used by psychic hoaxers of the past. The creators of the 'contest' can manipulate the data, and direct the winnings to their confederates.
Finally, the bizarre nature of the contest should raise some flags. They are giving out $10,000 for a program that would have been hacked together in a couple of months at most. What kind of value could you expect from a contest like this?
There is a good reason for this. If the game (or a small finite set of games) were pre-defined, it would be easy to have a bunch of human subjects play it and then have the emulator regurgitate such a "book". Most entries, I suspect, will be from people or teams who are familiar with studies of how real people do play such games.
Prime numbers are exactly what Alan Greenspan says they are -S. Minsky
As a recent alum (2002), I can shed some light on some things.
:-) )
Why is this in the Deparment of Humanities and Social Sciences?
From the URL, this Tournament is being run by the Social Sciences Experimental Laboratory (SSEL), not the CS department. The SSEL has been one of the leaders in experimental economics research (read: actually testing all those crazy theories you hear in economics classes).
Why is there money involved?
All experiments by the SSEL involve money. As an undergraduate, I participated in many experiments, mostly involving trading "commodities" in simple (and sometimes not-so-simple) markets. We were paid based on our performance. If I had an off night, I got paid $5 for 2 hours of the experiment. If I had a good night, I could make upwards of $80. Yes folks, this is real money we're talking about here. Since the point is to test people's economic thinking, you must make your decisions based on a real outcome, otherwise the data gathered is invalid.
Why then are they doing this test?
I don't work for the SSEL (and never have), but here's why I think they're doing this: Since they're interested in not only individual human behavior, but also how individuals interact and make choices based on the actions of other individuals, it would be useful to design a computer program that mimics other human's behavior. If other humans think this program acts like a human, then you can do two things: you can take the specifications of the computer program and figure out what qualities of the program humans have. As well, you can then replace humans with the computer program in real experiments (this not only allows you to test the limits of the program, but also to save money
And as an alum (who was not too fond of his time there, but still feels compelled to defend Caltech), it's *Caltech*, not *Cal Tech* or *Cal-Tech* (but if you're feeling lazy, *caltech* is all right too).
nak
(define humanator2 (lambda sex pr0n)
(if(and sex (not (isKiddy pr0n))
(masterbate sex pr0n)
0)))
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
The only game I want to play is Global Thermonuclear War.
The more entries they get, and I expect there should be quite a few, the more difficult it becomes to come up with a workable strategy for collusion among multiple entires. You'd have to submit a very large number of entries for it to work. I'm not sure if it's practical. If so, they might just modify the rules to prohibit it. They do get to look at the source code, you know.
Whether the results will be meaningful I have no idea. Could be - or maybe not. You'd need to look at a lot of sample human data in very different ways than they're usually looked at for this kind of game to even begin to judge whether it's an interesting challenge.
Four months is more than enough time for something like this. I don't see any problem there.
You seem to assume than anything involving $thousands must be a scam... maybe it is, but the reasons you give for that belief are mostly wrong. I'm sure you'd make an interesting test subject in the game.
Languages supported:
The computer program that you submit (for either an emulator or a detector) must be written in a combination of one or more of the following languages:
* C or C++
* java
* Perl
* Mathematica
* Gambit GCL
How am I supposed to do a combination of one? Stupid tech schools...
go away or i'll replace you with a very simple shell script.
$hungry = 0;
$falls_asleep=0;
$fav_tvshow_ison = 0;
until($hungry || $falls_asleep || $fav_tvshow_ison){
play snood;
}
Obviously I didn't read closely enough. Thanks to everyone who covered my err.
Er, I'm assuming you're a college student. Or high school student. $10,000 isn't that much money. Even, as you say, for a program "hacked together in a couple of months." Let's say it's just two months. That's $5,000/month for the winning entry. That's below what a good programmer makes.
/. banner ads do you think $10K would buy, with what return? What is the value of getting hundreds or thousands of /. types to think about this, and write comments, and generally stir up interest in the contest and company?
And what are they going to do with the program once they get it? Nothing. This isn't about buying programming time. Like most contests, they're betting that the contest itself will buy them more than $10K worth of promotion. How many
It's not much money, but they have already demonstrated a pretty savvy approach to spending it.
Cheers
-b
If I wanted a sig I would have filled in that stupid box.
It is not merely the possibility of scamming that is the problem.
There is something very deeply wrong with the theory and the experiment. You say yourself you would have to look at a lot of sample human data to judge this game; think about that for a moment. Wouldn't collecting a large amount of human data and fitting it with a neural network or whatnot be a more straightforward approach that leads to a scientific result?
There is feedback in this contest method that would lead to an unbounded number of refinements to emulators and detectors(and ever more research grants no doubt!) Its a tail chaser.
I am a retired software engineer.
If you believe this contest is really about marketing CalTech rather than a scientific approach to sociology or intelligence, I won't argue.
Note that my post just one way to approach the flaws riddling this contest...
Heh, distributed.net spent years brute-forcing RC5-64 for ... $10000 total. With only $2000 going to actual participants.
There is a flaw that makes this not a true turring test: The competition is set up so that your program only plays itself. Your program does not get a chance to play other programs or real humans. So it is sorta like a turring test where the computer is only allowed to talk with itself.
The true guts of the turring test come from telling if an unknown entity is a human or machine through its interaction with a known human, not its interaction with a copy of itself or another machine.
(sometimes the ineracting human decides, and sometimes an over the sholder observer tries to decide. depends on the setup)
To realy make it work, you need programs that can be input an arbitrary sequence of moves that can then decide the next move. Programs and humans can then be run against humans (and even other programs) randomly. The detectors job would be to decide wich players were human instead of which sets of games were human.
"You saved 1968." - Ms. Valerie Pringle to the crew of Apollo 8
The premise behind this competition is similar to Ai's Learning Machine Challenge. See www.a-i.com for more.
So they have numbers for games? Does chess have numbers too? Would you like to have a match in the game 202039832908130...
so the algorithm should produce data sets similar to human data sets. then it would be much easier to have a human detector before developing a human emulator... otherwise, how to test the emulator (before going to contest)??
for humans (i think) there are a lot of possible strategies (e.g.,revenge or even stupidity, intended 'randomness',always cooperative)... a neural network or similar would learn a 'general' strategy that would not really represent every one of the human strategies...
If my Calc II prof is any indication, I guess they are encouraging non-programmers to participate . . .
That would be trivial for a MMORPG. Just write a program to make the character stand around at popular spots, like vendors or quest dispensers, casting doubt on the manhood of passerby, and it will be indistinguishable from your typical 13 year old gamer. It could even be done with an existing program like Eliza, if its conversation database were tweaked to generate juvenile insults.
8-) Im happy
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
Go Beavers!
Caltech is a private university and not part of the UC system. To refer to it as "Cal Tech" or "CalTech" is not only wrong and misleading, but does a disservice to the people associated with that fine institution.
That said, I think the stuff happening there is very cool.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
He is right, the web site shouldn't be so technical (not all of us are in humanities, so they got some technical dude to write this up for us 'cs' people, when they could have written a better explanation themselves.)