Turing Test 2: A Sense of Humor

mhackarbie writes "Salon has a great story, Artificial Stupidity, about the Loebner Prize, a yearly contest that for over 10 years now has offered a $100,000 prize to anyone who can create a program to pass the Turing Test. The best part is the resulting fiasco that develops between the eccentric philanthropist who started the contest and extremely annoyed AI Researchers such as Marvin Minsky."

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Why the Turing Test is a waste of time

[profBill]

The following is an excerpt from an article by Drew McDermott about the "Red Herring Test". I always thought it pointed out quite well why the Turing Test seems like such a waste of time.

What confuses most people is that they mistake Turing's attempt to avoid the question for an attempt to answer it. But anyone who believes that Turing's test is an interesting test for intelligence is guilty of behaviorism, not a crime in itself, but shameful in anyone who believes in cognitive science, the antithesis of behaviorism. Of course, it is probably true that a system that could fool a trained panel of experts into believing it intelligent would in fact be intelligent, but it is blatant waste of experts' time to have them sit on such panels, when they should be inquiring about how minds actually work.

Compare the following hypothetical case: Human explorers land on a planet whose inhabitants are somewhat technologically backward. The locals are impressed by human gadgets, especially radio. They decide to try and understand it, so they rustle up some philosophers in order first to arrive at a criterion for something's being a radio. Their first cut is that a radio is a device that emits sounds whenever similar sounds are made in the control room of the earthlings' spaceship. But others object that this criterion does not rule out ordinary telephony, so the criterion is modified. Perhaps they arrive at something like, ``A radio is a device that emits sounds similar to those made in the earthlings' spaceship while suspended from the ceiling by a nonconducting string.''

This is all amusing, but a waste of time if the aliens really want to understand radio. No one needs an ironclad behavioral criterion for ``radiohood,'' assuming that there are plenty of indisputably genuine radios around to study. Such a study might eventually lead to a deeper definition of radio as ``A receiver of signals encoded as modulated electromagnetic waves,'' but by the time the definition was available it would be relatively unimportant, when stacked up against the theory of electromagnetism.

Similarly with intelligence. If we ever have a theory that explains it, we will no longer care about distinguishing bogus understanding from the real thing. We will have a rich theory based on concepts we can now barely imagine, just as radio is based on something as unlikely as invisible electromagnetic waves.