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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."
Any specified Turing Test can be defeated in much the same way as a lock-pick can defeat any specified lock, so perhaps we should move up one level of abstraction. I propose the "Meta Turing Test" which is as follows: specifying the conditions of the Turing Test (ability to lie, sense of humour, etc.) should allow a true human to design an automaton that fools the turing test, while a computer will not be able to do so.
Alternatively, why not just abandon the myth that human intelligence is some kind of mystical cloud, and see it for what it is, namely a set of thinking organs each designed (or adapted, if you prefer the 'evolution is a passive process' concept) to solve specific problems, in the same way as my hand is adapted to handling objects. Then, test each of these tools carefully. Anything - computer or human - that passes the tests can be defined as 'human'. Many beings that we today consider human will probably fail. Borg borg.
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I think that people who focus on the Turing test are missing the point, this isn't really AI and probably doesn't have much of a use outside advertising to via IRC/personal messaging etc.
The real interesting areas of research in AI are for example: in dye-master processes, where AI replaces a highly skilled human, or automating the driving of cars. These are all AI and, IMHO, much more impressive than glorified Eliza, Turing test stuff...
Physics of Consciousness
Building a machine to pass the Turing Test is one thing, but the nature of consciousness itself is the more profound question here. Rodney Brooks asked this question in a relatively recent Edge Online interview.
What are we missing in our computational models of living systems?
Chris
http://www.umsl.edu/~altmanc/
http://www.artilect.org/
Quantum computing / Artificial intelligence: http://www.umsl.edu/~altmanc/news.html
Turing stipulated in the Turing test (TT) that the "interrogator" specifically has the goal of trying to determine which of the contestants is human and which is the machine. Unfortunately, the way the Loebner contest is conducted, this important requirement is completely ignored (at least in the default $2000 prize). As a result, the results of the contest are completely irrelevant from the point of view of the Turing test. Claiming otherwise is incorrect and misleading, and Loebner fully deserves all the criticism he gets.
The TT is still fully valid today. We are very far from building bots that will pass it. (though Turing predicted that by 2000 we will have machines that will pass TT). In fact, the whole direction of work on the bots participating in the current day Loebner contests is irrelevant from the TT point of view. They work mostly by building enormous databases of statement-response pairs and doing minimal reasoning. Turing would have died laughing if he had known people would take this approach to passing the TT. Let me illustrate why the database idea is insufficient by itself: for a bot to pass the real TT, it would have to answer questions like "what is the integral of e^x dx". Remember that the interrogator is actively trying to find out if it is a human or a bot. The objection "but two humans in conversation wouldn't ask such question" is invalid, and this is precisely why the Loebner contest is stupid.
The reason why today's bots are so unsuccesful is not far to seek. It has long been known in the AI community that get anywhere near passing the TT, a bot would need what is known as "world knowledge". To build world knowledge, you need memory approximately the capacity of the human brain: estimated to be the order of a petabyte. And processing power to match: the brain runs something like a billion threads in parallel, and is 10^7 times as energy efficient per computation as today's computers. Of course, we aren't there yet. Thus, contrary to what most people would feel the thing that is holding AI up is hardware.
Similar to today's bot craze, there have been crazes in the past when people thought they were close to building truly intelligent machines ("expert systems" comes to mind.) However, they inevitably came up short because the hardware power wasn't there. In about 20-30 years, assuming there continue to be breakthroughs in storage technology to keep up the doubling, computers will be matching the brain's capacity, and then we'll be talking.
Summary: to hell with people who apparently popularize science and end up giving the real researchers a bad name.
In 1995, about a year after the publication of Shieber's article, Marvin Minsky, the father of artificial intelligence, posted a notice on the comp.ai and comp.ai.philosophy Usenet newsgroups. In it he drew attention to a clause in the Loebner contest rules to the effect that using the term "Loebner Competition" without permission could result in a revocation of the prize.
Minsky wrote, "I do hope that someone will volunteer to violate this proscription so that Mr. Loebner will indeed revoke his stupid prize, save himself some money, and spare us the horror of this obnoxious and unproductive annual publicity campaign. In fact, I hereby offer the $100.00 Minsky prize to the first person who gets Loebner to do this. I will explain the details of the rules for the new prize as soon as it is awarded, except that, in the meantime, anyone is free to use the name "Minsky Loebner Prize Revocation Prize" in any advertising they like, without any licensing fee."
(Minsky did not respond to e-mails requesting an interview.)
If the CACM article marked Loebner's fall from grace, the Minsky note on comp.ai marked his utter banishment into the wilds of A.I. quackery.
Can you imagine, for example, being a graduate student in computer science at a big-name school in 1996 and telling your major professor that your goal was to win the Loebner? Loebner was more "out" than Liberace.
But Loebner did not take his snubbing meekly. Loebner immediately wrote back that the best way for Minsky to get Loebner to revoke his prize was to win it. Of course Minsky had already hinted that Loebner had never made clear what the rules for winning the prize were, so that was not a very satisfactory rejoinder. But then a few days later ("while taking a nice hot bath, drinking a fine wine, about an hour after smoking a really fat joint"), Loebner came up with a more considered and clever response, one that still rattles Minsky nearly a decade later.
Minsky had announced that he would give $100 to whoever made Loebner stop his contest. But Loebner would only stop his contest when somebody won the gold medal. Therefore, Loebner reasoned, Minsky, being an honorable man, would give $100 to whoever won the ultimate Loebner competition. Therefore, Marvin Minsky was a cosponsor of the Loebner competition, simple as that. It was delicious!
Loebner promptly issued a press release saying that Marvin Minsky was now a cosponsor of the Loebner Prize, by virtue of his announcement of the "Minsky Loebner Prize Revocation Prize." What made this development so delightfully ironic was Minsky's own statement that anyone was free to use the name "Minsky Loebner Prize Revocation Prize" in any advertising they liked, which made it nearly impossible for Minsky to prevent Loebner from doing just that. Which is why Loebner continues to cite Minsky as a cosponsor of his event every chance he gets.
The image that comes to my mind whenever I think of this development is from the sublime cartoons of the late, great Chuck Jones, with Hugh Loebner in the role of Bugs Bunny, and Marvin Minsky, the father of artificial intelligence, in the role of Yosemite Sam, stamping his feet, with smoke coming from his ears. In fact, Minsky is still listed as a cosponsor of Loebner's prize on the Web site, and, as we'll see, Minsky is still stamping his feet.
You post is marked "Score:5 Funny", but I would mark it "Insightful".
That testers can believe that humans are computers is why it will never be a 'test'. Turing himself only ever called it the 'Imitation Game'.
If there is no way to tell humans from computers, how can you ever tell the computers from the humans?
We likes the 'turing test' not because it is scientific, but because, like intelligence itself, it is ill defined and imperfect.
I love the Loebner quote: "My reaction to intelligence is the same as my reaction to pornography, I can't define it but I like it when I see it."