Slashdot Mirror
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."
I don't think bots are the problem... I've had several online conversations which I'd assumed were chat-bots but turned out to be real people. I guess when Turing designed his test, he probably didn't anticipate the massive advances in human stupidity that we've witnessed in the last few decades :)
-- Open Source: It's mad, but you don't have to work here to help.
(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.
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.
Sig for sale or rent. One previous user. Inquire within.
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.
keyboard not found, press F1 to continue
Cheers,
Ian
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
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.
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.
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.