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Turing Test 2: A Sense of Humor

Posted by michael on from the funny-stuff dept.

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."

6 of 387 comments (clear)

  1. hmm, well by lingqi · · Score: 5, Insightful
    some people and their followers do not believe that machines will EVER achieve human level intelligence.

    (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?

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    My life in the land of the rising sun.

  2. Why are they upset? by sfled · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
    1. Re:Why are they upset? by FredFnord · · Score: 5, Insightful

      > Rule 17 was not the only example of Loebner and co. being pompous and humorless.

      I've looked over the article and some of the transcripts. It seems pretty obvious to me who gets the mantle of 'pompous and humorless.'

      Minsky's best attempt at humor was his $100 'prize', and Loebner turned that around and made it bite him so hard that I doubt the man will ever attempt humor again. Which is okay, I guess... it was amazingly pathetic and meanspirited even before Loebner hit him over the head with it.

      Basically, you have a person who everyone in the field thinks is a god. Is it any wonder that everyone in the field thinks that every time he opens his mouth, whatever he's arguing against is successfully demolished? They don't even have to listen to whatever he's saying... I mean, how often does God get out-argued in the bible? Can't happen. Ignore all evidence to the contrary. I guess it's not even surprising that his arguments don't hold water... if you've been considered a god for a while, your 'intelligent argument' muscles start to atrophy. And no matter what anyone says, those are diffreent muscles than the ones you flex when you're thinking about how to set up a new kind of neural net.

      It seems to me that Loebner has his points. You may not agree with them, but at least try to find sound reasons for disagreeing. Saying that HE is humorless and pompous, when Minsky has laid nearly exclusive claim to that particular high ground in the conversation, just makes you look, uh, humorless and pompous. And maybe a wee bit... dumb?

      -fred

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  3. Academic AI is a con game by RobotWisdom · · Score: 5, Insightful
    I was active on comp.ai at the time Minsky made his offer [Google query], and I'm convinced the real reason academic AI hates the Loebner Prize is that it shows up how little they've managed to accomplish.

    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.

  4. AI is a fraud by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  5. A.I. is an oxymoron by slimemold · · Score: 5, Insightful
    While the last thing I want to do is defend A.I. researchers, they have gotten a raw deal in one respect. Whenever a program performs a human-like endeavor (e.g. playing chess) at human-level-or-above ability, the first thing people ask is "How does it work?" The programmers then proudly explain their algorithms (e.g. adaptive n-ply search with a heuristic evaluation function emphasizing piece mobility blah blah blah).

    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.