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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."
(overall a good read. certainly a buttload of speculation but no more (actually probably less) than found in Wolfram's book)
On the other hand, I see nothing wrong with offering a prize for what he believes in. Heck we have the Templeton prize out there (more than the Nobel, no less) for best achievement in religion (christianity specifically, methinks), so what's wrong with offering 100G of his own money? We also have the X-BOX cracking contest - who is willing to bet that the believing in the chance of solving a 2048bit key in a few monthes is MUCH dumber than trying to shoot for some "not everybody agree as AI" AI?
My life in the land of the rising sun.
Why are Minsky and Shiber so upset that a sex-addicted pothead is sponsoring an A.I. prize, when the Father of Dynamite sponsors a Peace prize?
Loebner can do whatever he wants with his dough. No one is being coerced into entering his contest.
I'm not really a web designer, I just play one on the Internet.
the program that alters the test to fit its own capabilities. That is cheating? How more human can it get ? Humanity is constantly adapting it's surroundings to fit its own needs...
The author of the article appears never to have read the article by Turing where he described the so-called 'test'. It is clear that Turing was a deep and subtle thinker way ahead of his time. If you read what he is saying in context, he is arguing that first and foremost, thought can be automated in the sense of a universal computer which can compute anything that a brain can. To his critics who said that this was somehow impossible, he created a reducto-ad-absurdum argument; he said look if you are talking to this machine and it is composing sonnets which are like Shakespeare, and you *still* can't say it's intelligent, then you are an idiot. He was not proposing that this was an objective test or a desirable thing to do, he was poking fun at idiots like the author of the Salon article.
I agree that the entries are really bad-- one recent winner just said the same things no matter what the human asked. But one winner, unmentioned in Salon, was Thom Whalen, whose design was a genuine advance in the art. (Regrettably, Loebner changed the rules to exclude his approach in the future.)
What Whalen did was limit his domain to one topic, and compile a set of general answers to likely questions, which he matched by spotting keywords. So even if the answer wasn't a perfect match, it was general enough to be useful. This design should be better known and more widely used, and the Loebner contest would have been a good launchpad to bring it to people's attention if the academics weren't so prejudiced.
But the top academics get six-figure salaries for generating lots of jargon and no useful products, so a level playing-field is the last thing they want.
I worked in a research lab that shared a building with MIT's artificial intelligence laboratory. And I have to agree with the article. The AI field is a fraud. Again and again, there would be big placards in the lobby announcing gala media events up in the AI Lab. (We lesser mortals dutifully clomped upstairs to eat the expensive, catered food.)
And yet *nothing* *ever* *happens* in the field.
Every now and then a new "hero" emerges. For a while it was Minsky. In recent years, it has been Rodney Brooks. Regardless, you can see the current hero on TV all the time, commenting on matters as an "AI expert". They don't tell you that Brooks' course is widely viewed as a complete crock; a few puerile algorithms, some linear differential equations, some finite automata, and THAT'S IT. The rest is all blabbering with no substance.
The AI community uses rotating hero-worship in lieu of progress. But it isn't like any of these guys is an actual "AI expert". There are no "AI experts", because there is no such thing as artificial intelligence in this world. They are no more experts on AI than I am an expert on Martian fruit exports. In this field, you don't need real research; an Australian accent and good sense of humor suffice.
True artificial intelligence would be amazing. But the field has made essentially zero progress in the last fifty years. Obviously, it is a really hard problem. On one hand, the AI guys do what other fields do when they're stuck (since they *must* continue to pump out graduate students, attract grants, etc.), they keep trying to change the question. But the pathetic thing is that many completely denigrate the most obviously fair benchmark-- the Turing test.
Coincidentally, a benchmark showing the complete failure of the field.
Lo and behold, what first appeared to be intelligence is now just an elaborate sequence of if-then statements. Anyone could have done it. It's not intelligence at all. It's just following a blueprint. You call this intelligence?
In other words, the lay public expects A.I. to have creativity and strokes of genius, which is much more than they expect of most humans. Or they expect it to be furry with big eyes that makes cooing noises when you pet it. As soon as one realizes that A.I. consists of a computer program, any notion of intelligence evaporates.
This just shows that we don't actualy know what we mean when we say "Intelligence". It just meant "What I am thinking about when I say Intelligence".
The Turing Test is not a pass-mark to achieve intelligence, it is an outside limit to stop argument. If something passes, completely, the Turing test, then you know you have intelligence. But that is asn extremely high benchmark. It is like saying that if you can outrun all known vehicles, I have to grant you are a fast runner. You *may* still be a fast runner when when you run a lot slower than that - but we will have to enter into a discussion about how fast is fast. Turing just set an endpoint - it it passes his test it is certainly intelligent.
There are two ways the Turing Text could be passed. One is via a special purpose machine to pass it - a human simulator. While of research interest, because building such a machine would tell us a lot about how we actually do work, this is unlikely to be a very useful machine, because it will replicate our weaknesses as well as our strengths. Why spend billions building what half an hours funa and a nine month wait can build. (One-way trips to the stars, perhaps?).
The other way is a general purpose machine which has learned how to copy humans perfectly. By any definition I can think of, this would be an awesomely intelligent machine because it would have learned to understand, and simulate, our minds by the power of pure intellect. Something like playing all the instuments in the orchestra at the same time.
While I think that the first class of machine may well be built in the fullness of time, It will not be very useful. I don't know whether the second class will ever be built - I doubt it.
Which brings us back to the "sub-Turing" class of intelligence. If Turing represents an upper limit to the grey area of where intelligence starts, there must be levels of achievement which would be regarded as intelligent by most, if not all, peoples judgement.
I then ask the question: what use is sub-Turing intelligence? Well, there are lots of tasks which we regard as needing intelligence which we would like to automate. In fact, some of them have already been automated. But when we automate them, we say "we know how that automaton works, so it can't be intelligence". Chess, for example - once regarded as the last test before the Turing test, now regarded as a nifty but essentially unimportant achievement.
We don't actually *know* what we mean when we say "Intelligence". Turing knew that, and provided an empirical rather than analytical test. However, I would say that "Intelligence" bears the same relationship to "Computer Science" as "Magic" does to "Technology" in Clarke's Law: "Any sufficently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic".
"Any sufficiently advanced Computer Science is indistinguisahable from Intelligence" - Cawley's Law.
Or, to put it another way, Intelligence means "I don't understand how you thought that".
Which explains how Joe Luser thinks his computer is intelligent, whereas Bill Slashdot doesn't.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
Not hardly. As it turns out, one of the more frustrating aspects of AI is that once some particular computation that would appear to be correlated with intelligence can be performed, then it invariably doesn't count as AI anymore. So there are lots of practical systems out there today that can prove theorems, do symbolic algebra, play chess better than 99.999% of all people, a whole bunch of stuff. But hardly any of this strikes us as AI anymore. On the other hand, there are lots of horribly difficult problems out there whose solutions we really can't expect to get at within 10 years, and those are all "good" AI problems. Now, one thing that makes them good problems is that we know they contain many different thesis-sized projects that correspond to sub-goals for the "real" problem, and because it is possible that knocking off some of these subgoals could yield some real insights.
Now the interesting thing to notice here is that Turing was a *very* smart guy, and any program that successfully passes the strong version of the Turing Test has almost by definition solved every hard problem that confronts AI, and all of the subproblems that compose those problems, and... It's a truly gargantuan task, and one where even your most advanced programs are almost guaranteed to look really bad in competition.
Having said that, I do still think there is some point in holding contests like the Loebner, not for what they will tell us about the state of how fast AI is progressing, but because the programmers who compete at this point really are trying to scam the system and "get away with" producing a program that is NOT intelligent but that might LOOK like they are intelligent. Understanding how clever these deceptions can be, and why we fall for them, is itself an interesting by product of the competition. So the importance of ELIZA in the end was not that it was a great piece of code or introduced techniques that we could build on directly, but because it taught us a *lot* about people's implicit assumptions about a conversational partner, and how you could generate conversational situations that could finesse the hard stuff. So people don't go out to talk to ELIZA with the goal of determining that it is just a program; they don't go looking for the disconfirming evidence. That's a pretty key point in itself.
Babar
Part of the problem is that things that were once considered part of AI have moved out and become mainstream technology. Voice recognition, Expert Systems, Fuzzy Logic, Neural Nets, Chess playing computers...all of these were once considered to be unsolved AI problems but since they are now in common use, we don't consider them a part of AI anymore.
You can find plenty of twenty to thirty year old textbooks that tell you that playing chess at grand master level would be a sign of computer intelligence - now we know that all it takes are some clever heuristics and a lot of CPU power.
As soon as computers can pass the Turing Test, it'll be considered laughable that anyone ever thought it required *intelligence* to chat with a human. In a sense, this has already happened. Quite a few people were convinced by Eliza - but you can tell from just looking at the code that it's not intelligent.
The same thing is happening with animals. We used to define humans as the only tool-using animals - then they found birds breaking open clamshells by dropping rocks on them. The definition changed to humans as the only tool *making* animals...then they found chimpanzees who strip the leaves from twigs before they poke them into anthills. So then it was 'self recognition' - that also failed with dolphins who can recognise themselves in a mirror. Now it's some other thing. Animals will never be labelled intelligent" because the definition of intelligence is that thing that humans have but animals do not.
I predict that we'll never have AI. That isn't a failure of the work - it's in the nature of our definition of Intelligence as "that thing that humans have that animals and machines don't have".
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