Slashdot Mirror
Everything you Want to Know About the Turing Test
An anonymous reader writes "Everything you want to know about
the Turing test provided by
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. It is their
latest entry."
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
How to build a computer actually capable of truly beating it.
I think this is the wrong road to go down. We should make computers better for people, but they should be made to actually think and reason. We have enough trouble doing this ourselves and if we have machines doing it they will surely out think us, and then what?
Checkmate
The Anti-Turing Test
Suicide Booth: You are now dead! Thank you for using Stop and Drop, America's favorite since 2008.
more information on how to build an automated computer... hopefully microsoft will steer clear of this, a bugged out, Windows CE powered android is not quite my idea of a friendly robot..
Brings new meaning to "Blue Screen of Death"
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
The article itself gives pretty good coverage of Turings point
of view. It gives better coverage of the Turing test than I've
read in many AI books.
I tend to agree more with Searle though, whom he cites at the
end of the article "John Searle argues against the claim that
appropriately programmed computers literally have cognitive
states". Being a programmer myself, I don't feel that
programming something so that it can perform extremely well in a
specific test is necessarily indicative of Artificial
Intelligence or Intelligence in general. I agree with Turing
that the question of "do computers think" is vague enough to be
almost meaningless in a precise sense, but I think we understand
the statement taken as a whole.
I don't particularly agree with this statement in response
to the consciousness argument: "Turing makes
the effective reply that he would be satisfied if he could
secure agreement on the claim that we might each have just as
much reason to suppose that machines think as we have reason to
suppose that other people think" The question isn't whether or
not other people think, people thinking is an axiomatic
assumption when investigating Intelligence, unless you are
investigating existence from a philosophical point of view as
Descarte did. I guess I view AI from a more practical point of
view, I am by no means an expert in AI, but I tend to think the
goal of AI research is to produce systems that can learn and
react appropriately in different situations that they were never
programmed to handle or necessarily anticipate. If that isn't
the goal of AI research, what separates it from writing programs
on a large scale?
As a whole I found the article to be a good presentation of
Turing's position, although I have a few philosophical
differences with that position.
Doug Tolton
"The destruction of a value which is, will not bring value to that which isn't." -John Galt
From the office of Iraqi Information Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf (aka Baghdad Bob):
"Republican guards have secured the Turing test provided by Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy!"
More at 11.
Karma: The shiznight, mostly because I am the Drizzle.
"Turing's thesis:
LCMs [logical computing machines: Turing's expression for Turing machines] can do anything that could be described as "rule of thumb" or "purely mechanical". (Turing 1948:7.)"
This is why you didn't go into the exciting field of AI. You didn't understand it, and needed Artificial Intelligence to figure it out for you.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
The article says: ... (3) be beautiful
:)
Turing considers a list of things that some people have claimed machines will never be able to do:
How true... My beige box begs for beauty. I must resist though, or it would develop a sense of pride. Pride, of course, leads to misbehavior. I want my computer to work at its best!
Ahh I passed the Test... Now to rid myself of those pesky humans!!
If a program replies with "First Post" then logs off, does it win?
i wonder if any people have taken the touring test and how they did. it wouldn't surprise me and i think it would be ammusing if some people's results came back that they didn't have a human level of cognitative reasoning.
Beer Die is the game of champions Learning To walk my own path.
the thing that always gets me, is when people get all hyped up about AI and the like, they never can figure out 'what's so great about it.'
i mean, at best we build a robot modelled to X hot chick that will screw you eight ways from sunday and whatnot. beyond sex and gaming AI, what the hell could it do that's so great?
Are you MORE than your SPINAL COLUMN?
We must have the Bombe.
After all, in its day, it was 'da bombe'.
I vote for a Poon Turing Test. As if porn didn't drive enough technology, put a few hundred lonely hackers in a room, pay them well (with hot pockets and mountain dew) and watch the cybersex A.I. develop!
Turing estimated that in 50 years (year 2000), 70% of people shouldn't have been able to tell they're talking to a computer (which of course didn't happen).
Shit...give those geeks a month...
</joke>
My paranoid mind is imagining that I'm the only human on /. and that all the other posts are automatically generated by Slashcode. Fortunately for me some of the trolls are too imaginative to have been produced by a machine.
If you outlaw the law, only criminals will have laws
From this bot:
:)
User: DO YOU GIVE ORAL SEX?
Iniaes: No, I don't.
User: WHY DON'T YOU?
Iniaes: That feature was turned off due to abuse.
I think if the feature was turned back on, the bot might convince a judge or two.
They have no nonquantized storage of previous quantized input. Idiots.
For any article posted does the user:
;)
1 - rushs to be FP
2 - blames Microsoft (Microsoft related story or not)
3 - sing the virtues of OSS over PS if the story is about a security flaw in PS.
4 - sing the virtues of OSS over PS if the story is about a security flaw in OSS.
5 - post contains "In Soviet Russia"
6 - post contains "Imagine a beo..."
7 - post contains Microsoft/Sony/MPAA/RIAA/DRM/DMCA is evil.
If any of these are true, then the poster is definitely human. A computer would never be smart enough to show so much creativity and independant thought
I think the axiomatic assumption that people think is part of the problem. If we cannot say why the claim is that people think, it's easy to just debunk any AI claims by outright statement. "People think, while computers are just machines." You can't really make any progress in the face of that.
That's part of my problem with Searle's Chinese Room thought experiment. He's saying that an automaton responding to Chinese following rules would not "understand" Chinese in the way a human who speaks the language would. But this is presupposing that the way a human who "understands" Chinese does so is not through just a very long list of rules coded in neurons, which I consider to be a rather controversial assumption.
In short, a lot of anti-AI arguments seem to start from the premise that humans are not essentially biological computers; with that premise, of course you can debunk AI. A lot of AI researchers have grown tired of the argument entirely, and instead of responding to the arguments, have just resorted to saying "ok fine, you're right, we can't make 'really' intelligent computers, but what we can do is make computers that do the same thing an intelligent person would do, which is good enough for us." The idea here being that if a computer can eventually diagnose diseases better than a doctor, pilot a plane better than a pilot, translate Russian better than a bilingual speaker, and so on, it doesn't really matter if you think it's "really" intelligent or not, because it's doing all the things an intelligent thing would do.
As a final comment, I'd agree with the AI being not that fundamentally different from large software systems. The difference is basically one of focus -- AI has been focusing on what it means to "act intelligently" for decades, whereas much CS and software engineering was focused on more low-level details (like how memory or register allocation works). At one point, the division was more clear -- AI people did stuff like write checkers programs that learned from their mistakes, which was not something any CS person not in AI would do. The fields are increasingly blending, and a lot of stuff from engineering disciplines like control logic (how to "intelligently" control chemical plants, for example) is overalapping with AI research. Part of this is because a lot of AI ideas have actually matured enough to become usable in practice.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Sometimes I wonder if we should be testing for the sentient capabilities of computers, when its often difficult to find a human with sentient capabilities. (Those of you working in Customer Service or IT may understand this better; "Sir, is it plugged in?")
I've always hated the Turing test. It's too subjective, and has forced people into believing that sentience (what the lay-person thinks AI is) can be simulated. It forced AI junkies to think the road to AI was paved by the perfect grammar for English; a pipe dream to be sure.
AI is not being able to have a conversation with your computer, AI is just algorithms -- computing the right answer to complex problems as quickly as possible.
What most people think of as AI is really Artificial Sentience, and the more I learn about computer hardware the more I realize that it will not happen on my PC.
"Times have not become more violent. They have just become more televised."
-Marilyn Manson
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
Are you required to take as part of applying for US presidency ?
for the last time people, I am "frodo from middle eaRTH", not "middle eaST".
That's WAY MORE than I ever wanted to know about the Turing Test!
What do you eveything you want to know about the Turing Test?
One interesting argument mentioned in the article is from Ned Block. As a counterexample to the thesis that the turing test is a good test for intelligence, Block imagines a device which is just a huge table connecting inputs to preprogrammed outputs. This "blockhead" (not named by Ned Block I think) would clearly not be intelligent, as it is just a very simple database, but if the outputs were correctly set up it could pass the Turing test with flying colors. Thus passing any Turing-like test does not necessarily imply intelligence---we'd have to know something more about the structure of the machine first.
http://www.ibiblio.org/Dave/Dr-Fun/df200304/df2003 0410.jpg
BlackNova Traders
This is slightly off-topic...
Let me remind everybody that Alan Mathison Turing had an "accident", or committed suicide as many people believed, after having put through an humiliating process by his country's lack of concern for private life.
Alan Turing was gay. After being robbed by an one-night-stand encounter, he filed a complaint with the police. He was then prosecuted for being gay, and offered the choice between to prison, or undergoing hormone therapy to suppress his sexual instincts (female hormons - I think he got side effects like slightly growing breasts).
Yes, we're not talking of Iran, the Taleban or other theocracies. I'm talking of the United Kingdom, with its tradition of pride of their alleged personal freedoms.
Of course, such laws aren't on the books anymore. Yet anti-sodomy laws are still in the books in several US states; they are seldom, if hardly, applied, but they still do exist and may be the legal basis for discrimination.
Many religious, or non-religious, organizations have agendas to impose upon our personal lives. We should always be watchful.
This story should also remind us that personal freedoms are not a matter of just taking pride in one's country's alleged respects for human rights.
Thanks for your attention.
Inventing true computer intelligence (what is often referred to as strong AI), has often been compared to inventing a flying machines by many AI supporters. They claim there were just as many nay-sayers at the end of the 19th century regarding whether we could physically build a flying machine.
I don't remember who, but someone published a great article in Scientific American that claimed the Turing Test has mis-guided the goals of artificial intelligence. He said, instead of trying to build a bird, let's try and build an airplane. Building AI that was truly human-like would be as useless as building a flying machine that was truly bird-like.
The best thing I've seen is ELIZA, and while she's sometimes suprisingly astute, the facade doesn't hold up for long . . .
I failed the Turing Test the first time I took it, but I'm studying hard this time.
It's amazing how much "mature wisdom" resembles being too tired. - Robert Anson Heinlein
In Soviet Russia... Turing Tests You!
As intelligence operating outside of human beings. This includes Decarte's mechas, a HAL-like computer program, extra-terrestials, chimps and dolphins, a ghost, gaia, etc.
When will I stop hearing about this lame test that people attach far too much significance to?
Machine consciosness will never happen. Kurzweil and his ilk are fantasizing about the impossible.
Consciousness experience cannot be absolutely defined or measured. How can you describe the experience of the color "red" and what it feels like? It's not possible. Just like it is not possible to write a computer program that constructs that sensation. The sensation, or conscious feeling of something is not reductive (as would be necessary in a computational model).
Strong AI supporters are too wrapped around the functional and behavioral aspects of the mind and overlook the more subtle aspects of it. It is easy to see why someone would think the functional model of the brain could be emulated using a computational "turing machine", but conscious experience is a whole other thing.
About this point (which, in case you were wondering, basically says that you shouldn't expect even the best of machines to be able to make a decent response for anything said to it, but this is something that "even the dullest of men can do"), do the "dullest of men" do this? I find that one of the best things about being human is that we can ask for more information. I don't think that "dull men" can intelligently respond to a discussion about astrophysics, just as I don't think a technogeek like myself can comfortably insert himself into a discussion about non-tech pop culture. :) Don't we all have our areas? Why should we expect a thinking computer to be able to respond to EVERYTHING when even we humans cannot?
When we took the intro to AI class in college, we had a long, somewhat philosophical discussion.
What we concluded was this:
A computaional problem to solve is an AI problem until you know how it works.
Once you know how it works and it is well defined it is no longer AI.
SCO to Hell
...against machine conciousness is that it allows for a perfect simulation of "thinking" by a machine but still says that the machine cannot be judged "concious". In other words, if I am an android that writes poetry, sings and dances, falls in love and runs for the senate and wins etc., I am still not to be considered concious because the stuff between my ears is not of the right type.
At bottom,the question of whether a machine is concious or a "person" is a question of the civil rights we are willing to grant the machine. Searle is often considered a kind of anti-AI bigot for this reason.
Oddly enough (or not) Data's story in Star Trek: Next Generation is probably as good a guide to this issue as you are likely to find.
Cheers,
JHCVH 1
;-)
(Summer 2003)...From Kluwer Academic Publishers in the Netherlands, edited by Robert Epstein and Grace Peters, subtitled: "Philosophical and Methodological Issues in the Quest for the Thinking Computer."
Invited contributors include contributions from Andrew Hodges, Jon Agar, Noam Chomsky, Daniel Dennett, Stevan Harnad, Kenneth Ford, Douglas Hofstader, John R. Lucas, Roger Penrose, David Rumelhart, Selmer Bringsjord, Ned Block, David Chalmers, The Churchlands, Andy Clark, H. M. Collins, Jack Copeland, Hubert Dreyfus, Jerry Fodor, Robert M. French, Thomas Metzinger, Peter Millican, James Moor, Ariella V. Popple, Zenon Pylyshyn, John Searle, Hugh Loebner, Stuart Shieber, Richard Wallace, Joseph Weizenbaum, Rodney Brooks, Peter Dayan, Brue Edmonds, Anne Foerst, David Harel, Patrick J. Hayes, Mark Humphrys, Douglas Lenat, John McCarthy, Jon Oberlander, Ian Pratt, Willaim J. Rapaport, Murray Shanahan, Aron Sloman, Chris Thornton, Stuart Watt, Blay Whitby, Terry Winograd, Robbie Garner, Jason Hutchens,David Levy, Joseph Weintraub, Thomas Whalen, Veronique Bastin & Dennis Cordier, Kevin L. Copple, Bruce Cooper, Thad Crew, Richard Gibbons, Gerold Lee Gorman, David Hamill, Sandy Johnson & Chris Johnson, Chris S. Johnson, Laurence Matishak, Michael L. Maudin, Peter Neuendorffer, Michale Onofrio & Stephen Hildebran, Luke Pellen, Joseph Strout, Ed T. Toton III, Vladimir Veselov & Eugene Demchenko, George B. Dyson, Neil Gershenfeld, Michael Gross, Raymond Kurzweil, James Martin, Hans Moravec, Charles Platt and of course, myself (pdf copy of chapter).
... it's a bit premature (and probably somewhat chauvinistic) to say machines will never become conscious. Vast forests have died to present reflections on this conundrum, with inconclusive results.
It may end up that at some point machines will be able to emulate nerve mechanisms and behaviors so well that we end up having to redefine what consciousness is, if only to protect our position on the cognitive pyramid. Perhaps these 'machines' will be bio-based, if we find that biological processes are more efficient and capable matter assemblers at the cell level, in which case are they still machines?
If we go the bio route, will our achievements be any less interesting or relevant because we hacked^H^H^H^H^H^Hleveraged mother nature's toolkit instead of doing things the hard way?
This was easy to read...
by 2Lazy2Register () on Tuesday, December 10th, 2002 @ 06:22AM
There is a reason for everything. Sometimes that reason just sucks.
Part of my argument I suppose was focusing on whether there was a meaningful difference between (1) and (2). Is there something that it is to "think" or "possess intelligence" beyond merely acting intelligently? If not, (2) is equivalent to (1). If so, what is the difference?
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
"You are in a desert, and you see a tortoise lying on its back..."
All distinctions are arbitrary.
Some people say a computer can't think, but a computer can simulate atoms and quantum mechanics. If that's all there is to your brain, then it isn't logically impossible, right?
Even better, there has been progress reverse-engineering brain regions like some auditory or visiual -- giving us the actual algorithms the brain uses. Shouldn't work like that be enough?
P.S. A lot of arguments go like this: Computers use first order logic, we don't, so AI can't work. Haven't there been higher order logics implemented in software?
... the voight-kampf test?
Absinthe makes the heart grow fonder
... that humans, when drunk, would easily fail the Turing test? (repetition, shorter sentences, etc...)
No, really.
2.9 Argument from Extra-Sensory Perception
The strangest part of Turing's paper is the few paragraphs on ESP. Perhaps it is intended to be tongue-in-cheek, though, if it is, this fact is poorly signposted by Turing. Perhaps, instead, Turing was influenced by the apparently scientifically respectable results of J. B. Rhine. At any rate, taking the text at face value, Turing seems to have thought that there was overwhelming empirical evidence for telepathy (and he was also prepared to take clairvoyance, precognition and psychokinesis seriously). Moreover, he also seems to have thought that if the human participant in the game was telepathic, then the interrogator could exploit this fact in order to determine the identity of the machine -- and, in order to circumvent this difficulty, Turing proposes that the competitors should be housed in a "telepathy-proof room." Leaving aside the point that, as a matter of fact, there is no current statistical support for telepathy -- or clairvoyance, or precognition, or telekinesis -- it is worth asking what kind of theory of the nature of telepathy would have appealed to Turing. After all, if humans can be telepathic, why shouldn't digital computers be so as well? If the capacity for telepathy were a standard feature of any sufficiently advanced system that is able to carry out human conversation, then there is no in-principle reason why digital computers could not be the equals of human beings in this respect as well. (Perhaps this response assumes that a successful machine participant in the imitation game will need to be equipped with sensors, etc. However, as we noted above, this assumption is not terribly controversial. A plausible conversationalist has to keep up to date with goings-on in the world.)
After discussing the nine objections mentioned above, Turing goes on to say that he has "no very convincing arguments of a positive nature to support my views. If I had I should not have taken such pains to point out the fallacies in contrary views." (454) Perhaps Turing sells himself a little short in this self-assessment. First of all -- as his brief discussion of solipsism makes clear -- it is worth asking what grounds we have for attributing intelligence (thought, mind) to other people. If it is plausible to suppose that we base our attributions on behavioral tests or behavioral criteria, then his claim about the appropriate test to apply in the case of machines seems apt, and his conjecture that digital computing machines might pass the test seems like a reasonable -- though controversial -- empirical conjecture. Second, subsequent developments in the philosophy of mind -- and, in particular, the fashioning of functionalist theories of the mind -- have provided a more secure theoretical environment in which to place speculations about the possibility of thinking machines. If mental states are functional states -- and if mental states are capable of realisation in vastly different kinds of materials -- then there is some reason to think that it is an empirical question whether minds can be realised in digital computing machines. Of course, this kind of suggestion is open to challenge; we shall consider some important philosophical objections in the later parts of this review.
Another way to compare machine and human intelligence is in the design of complex, patentable systems.
from: http://www.genetic-programming.com/gpemcontrol.pd
This brings up two interesting points to think about: patents aren't always evil and there are other, more practical tests for machine intelligence that Turing proposed which are not widely known.
std::disclaimer<std::legalese> sig=new std::disclaimer; sig->dump(); delete sig;
I think I know all I need to about this topic now. I asked ELIZA:
Eliza: Hello. I am ELIZA. How can I help you?
Me: Do you believe the Turing Test is sufficient to evaluate artificial intelligence?
Eliza: Oh, i believe the turing test is sufficient to evaluate artificial intelligence.
Figures she'd think that.
comic here
BlackNova Traders
It is the game of champions indeed.
Game on!
From the article:
"Given the knowledge that something is indeed a machine, evidence that that thing can produce different arrangements of words so as to give an appropriately meaningful answer to whatever is said in its presence is evidence that there can be thinking machines."
This is where the author is wrong.
This argument:
a)If a machine can produce different arrangements of words so as to give an appropriately meaningful answer to whatever is said in its presence, this machine thinks.
b)This particular machine can produce different arrangements of words so as to give an appropriately meaningful answer to whatever is said in its presence.
c)Ergo, this particular machine thinks.
is as inconclusive as this argument:
a)If a machine can dance, it can think.
b)This particular machine can dance.
c)Ergo, this particular machine thinks.
What I mean is that the hypothetical statement "If a machine can produce different arrangements of words so as to give an appropriately meaningful answer to whatever is said in its presence, this machine thinks." is never proven, much like "If a machine can dance, it can think." has not been proven.
In the future all of mankind will eventually migrate their consciousness to computers. What path we take now is merely choosing what path is taken to the inevitable conclusion -- which is that at some point before or after this happens a cosmic event will wipe out everything in our solar system, and as an entire species we will have meant less than a blip on the universal radar screen. Let's face it folks, if there isn't an afterlife of some kind we might as well blow ourselves up anytime.
Happy goldfish bowl to you.
Is that a world of intelligent computers who have replaced humans, or who live cooperatively with humans, or who have enslaved humans, whatever, would almost certainly have to deal with the phenomena we describe as telepathy. After all, we can only assume that such creatures would be outfitted with the capacity to transmit data in a wireless fashion. Therefore, accessing the 'thought patterns' of another computer would simply be a matter of wireless hacking, if such could be accomplished without the host being aware of it.
Happy goldfish bowl to you.
Thinking machine:
a ses (of which the properties would be carried - NEVER WHOLE SENTENCES, JUST THE OBJECTS AND THEIR PROPERTIES)
;) and it has a price. But, if an object is entered, of which class is not known, the machine should identify correctly its class by comparing its properties to the properties of other known objects. If there would be a match or close-match the object would be automatically linked to that object and the superobject or the subobject would be correctly linked to the relationshipchart of the object.
it would modify itselfs thoughts, that is "opinions". All objects would be classified with different adjectives, and the machine would learn its properties from the converstations carried out with humans, as well as from Internet search engines. Every word would be recorded in a database with appropriate classifications.
For example:
-word class (noun, verb etc...)
-subjective adjectives (=properties) The properties would be collected from human conversators (who would also be classified and recorded, according mostly to their reliability to provide correct information)
-location
-abstract/concrete
-phr
-relations of objects to another
-creator of historical properties
This allows for example one conversator to tell a story to the machine, and the machine would then record a story with all its associated properties to different objects, including the history information so that particualar knowledge could be traced back to its originator and thus put into peer review to judge correctly the conversator's reliability etc.
To operate correctly the machine should have a sentence parsing mechanism, which allows the sentences to be constructed in a correct manner. Additionally the machine should have capable of understanding relations between objects-objects, objects-properties and vice versa. One object can be a subobject of several objcets. The properties can and will be the same for several objects. For example:
Orange:
-fruit
-orange (colour)
-edible
-tasty (opinion) (creator: Anonymous Coward | date: 090403/2251 | reliability: null | number_of_converstaions_with_me: 1)
-food
-product
Hmmmm... an orange is an product, because it is commonly sold (or it wouldn't even have to COMMONLY sold, but anyway it's a product
An important thing is to note that EVERY word which is used is an object itself. For example:
Fruit:
-{container listing all its subobjects, as orange, apple, banana, kiwi etc.)
-{container listing all its superobjects, as tree, seed, fruit box [which is mostly in a shop (grocery store) [which is also its subobject, as it is contained by the objet (fruit)]}
-edible [52%] edibility amount -> edibility amount of fruits in a certain area]. This means also that for example time would be a BASIC PROPERTY which is related to all objects in some sort of away. Maybe each object should have its creation date. Like Audi A4 1988, homo sapiens 50.000 b.C ( diameter, unspecified -> area, containing a specified number of angles -> area, length of sides added together etc. etc.}, purpose [?] etc.).
I think everything essential is entered here, these thoughts will just have to be formulated in a more understandable manner. Later.
What about creating a Turing test, which tries to find out whether it B and C are human or not?
...to know everything you want to know about the Turing test.
The Turing test is, as you pointed out, an example of the sort of AI approach I mentioned, but I think it's testing for something slightly off what AI should really be looking at. It's not testing "is something intelligent," but is instead testing "is something intelligent in the same way humans are intelligent?" That is, it has to be "smart" when humans are and be dumb where humans are. If asked a complex math question, it has to pretend not to be able to compute it instantly, etc. Basically, it requires perfect modeling of human responses, which seems to be missing the point in a way; it should be possible to create an intelligent machine that is intelligent in some way differing from humans. Though I suppose the reason Turing picked it is because of, as was mentioned elsewhere here, the axiomatic assumption that humans are intelligent. But in any case, I think it's somewhat akin to making the goal of aeronautical engineering "make an artificial bird that flies exactly like a crow does, in fact so exactly like a crow that it even fools other crows into thinking it's a crow."
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Alcmaeon is the newest entry. And I bet that changes by the end of the weekend.
I have never had much respect for Searle. He often says things to the effect of: "Sure a computer can simulate a fire, but noone believes the fire will burn us" Well a computer can simulate a calculator and that works fine. It's not just as simple as "The computer is a calculator," but rather it has a software decsription to do what any good calculator does. Many of his assumptions are that the brain works in some special wasy, but he never states specifically what it is about the brain that cannot be duplicated.
He also often talks about systems, breaking them into pieces and saying that in no single piece can we find the source of intelligence, yet if we tore the brain to pieces and neurons or such, we would also be loath to find "intelligence" in most of those small units.
In short, I don't understand why Philosophy types constantly conjecture on the nature of things that are so influenced by biology and information theory when there are experts who have a better idea how these processes actually work
I think Turing (and Descartes) are trying to say that for lack of being able to know how "intelligence" works, we must just assume that anything that has the full apearance of intelligence as far as we can test must be assumed to be intelligent.
Why doesn't someone write an "AI" that reads the story (or comments for) and makes up some sort of response? Whether it makes sense or not, whether it's topical or not, and see what the karma tells us!
...was the gom jabbar. The applicant places his hand inside of a pain inducer while a Bene Gesserit witch holds a the gom jabbar to his or her neck. If the applicant removes his or her hand from the box in response to the pain, the highly poisonous and pointy gom jabbar is used and the applicant dies. If the applicant does not remove his or her hand from the box despite the pain, the applicant passes and is considered human. Frank Herbert's theory is that the test of being a human is that a human's intellect allows the human to act in an intelligent manner despite strong animalistic urges to act otherwise. Compared to this, Turing's test seems simplistic - pretend well enough to be a human, and you'll be a human.
/. readers) would not pass as human to the Bene Gesserit. Some may not pass as human to Turing. The question we have to answer before developing a test for intelligence isn't whether or not a computer can be intelligent, but rather what exactly is intelligence. Turing's test is little more than a "if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, then it's a duck" test. Is that enough? I really don't think that it is. A true intelligence ought to be able to act in an inspired, creative, and perhaps even irrational manner. Many of the things we do are not entirely rational, including much of the partisan discussion concerning various OS's.
It is ironic, however, that a computer would pass the gom jabbar more readily than a homo sapiens. However, both tests start with an implicit principal assumption: A definition as to what a human is. Many of us here (not to single out
144l. ph34r my 133t l3g4l 5k1lz!
One comment that I have about the entry is that it spends time criticising Turing's guesses as to when machines might be able to pass the Test. To me, that section of Turing's paper is just idle speculation that has nothing to do with the paper's central contentions.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
I believe if one accepts Chomsky's theories of language, that it is actually impossible to encode all possible language behavior as an input-output system. I'm not an expert on the subject so I can't say so for sure though. The thrust, though, would be that language has to be encoded in a manner which is more complex than a stimulus-response system because no stimulus-response system can fully implement language; thus, Searle's example of a Chinese room built on a stimulus-response system would be impossible to construct, making his thought experiment incoherent.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
This is a much better site, as far as Singularity-type stuff goes. It's the personal page of Eliezer Yudkowsky, one of the founders of the Singularity Institute (a much blander site than his personal one).
I hosted a bachelor party at Searle's Chinese Room. Excellent catering, a great price, and never an empty glass. Might I recommend the Scorpion Bowls.
The chinese room argument goes thus:
My own view of this argument is that it is a big heap of bullshit.
Be careful! New moon tonight.
If anyone would bother to actually read Turing's paper where he describes the 'test', you would see that he was not proposing the test literally, but as a reductio-ad-absurdum argument.
The issue was that many people at that time (and many today) seem to have a religious belief that thinking cannot be implemented in any way except with a human biological brain. Turing could clearly see that the human brain was a computational engine, and he of course defined the concept of a universal computer. Thus, it was obvious to him that you could build an artificial intelligence.
His "test" was really a way of gently pointing out the absurdity of the arguments of people like Searle (who came much later), who would blindly deny that a machine could ever think.
Turing's point was, to paraphrase "look, if I give you a machine which is indistinguishable in every respect from a human, which you can talk to in depth on any subject of the arts or sciences, and you *still* don't call that intelligence, then you are just so wedged that there is no point in talking about this anymore".
He would be saddened I think, and slightly disgusted, to see people twisting the whole purpose of his little thought experiment to argue for the kind of ignorance and transparently idiotic rhetoric of the kind that Searle and other "critics" of artificial intelligence try to make.
Searle's main thrust seems to be that the Chinese Room is an example of simple lookup table responses, which he claims is not understanding. If there was a full Turing machine running the responses (rather than a simple lookup table), it becomes much less clear that he can say there's no understanding going on.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Forgive me. I posted this in a different article a few days ago. I didn't really get any feedback. This subject fits my question much better.
Lets say that one day a computer passes the Turing test. Then lets say that a few years later it passes it again, only this time it passes utilizing voice recognition and speech synthesis.
If you think about it this is gonna be a really hard test for the computer to pass. I can't even imagine what is involved in figuring in voice inflection, accents and stuff like that.
Anyways it is at the point where you are on the telephone and you can converse with a computer and you have no idea it is a machine.
Hence, it passed the Turing test.
What happens if the computer begins to make the argument that turning it off and disasembling it is no different then killing a person or an animal?
What happens if the computer starts to make the argument that it is capable of thought?
What are the implications of that?
Why couldn't it be the case that there are intelligent things that are unable to carry on a conversation, or, at any rate, unable to carry on a conversation with creatures like us? (See, for example, [the] French [...])
>there has been progress reverse-engineering brain regions like some auditory or visiual
I think that is the best argument for AI or Simulated intelligence or whatever you'd call the final results.
Sure, knowing what kind of atom at what location and reproducing those results exactly is probably impossible, but the black-box approach to reverse engineering doesn't have to be that exact. A reasonable facsimile of what a human, or more realistic right now, an animal brain would be pretty impressive. It could even be emulated as software, but it's just as possible that it will start as custom hardware first.
Look at the recent articles about the artificial hippocampus developed at the university of southern California. They used a black box reverse engineering approach; they didn't punch out a bunch of algorithms all day and simulate neurons on a supercomputer first. Imagine other reversed engineer brain parts acting in concert. That's probably your best bet for classic sci-fi-like AI right there, plus it has applications in helping people with brain disease and mind-blowing possibilities regarding brain customization.
Maybe AI is like manned flight and massive and cheap computing power. One day it's a big deal if not a fraud and then a couple decades later we're sick of all the talking doors and think the refrigerator has a crush on the robot dog.
Maybe Turing imagined that _he_ would build such a robot so quickly. Very few modern engineers can light a candle to him..
The notion that Turing proposed about determining Artificial Intelligence, emerging from "computer bits," has to be broadened in context of the "network bits" or "nits." This is because of the human-nature derived unpredictability in the Human-Computer networks.
While the material and natural forces help to differentiate between, say high and low voltage, and define the computer bit, the human-nature forces help differentiate between bestseller and pulp fiction, and thus partially define the "network bit" or "nit." This confoundedness of human or their agent involvement in the very definition of the symbolic meaning, and value, of different "states" (like high and low and lower, or 0 and 1) differentiates the network "nit" from the computer "bit."
When we try to adapt the Turing Test to try to decide if the human-computer network can be said to be "thinking" as well as a human, we must pay special attention to the
Thus, we have to modify and adapt the Turing test if we want to apply it to intelligence in networked machine and human - or in the HuCoNOS - Human-Computer Network Operating System More dtails are available here http://www.bubbleui.com/thesis/Invention%20disclos ure%20NCSU%20Sept%2025%202000.doc
To see a world in a grain of sand, and then to step back and see the beach where the sand lies
You're wrong, that's completely untrue. In fact, it's the exact opposite.
Check those articles about jwz's "review" or one of those distribution reviews. Count the number of +3/4/5 Insightful/Informative/Interesting posts that say Linux is a usability nightmare or is nothing compared to Windows XP or how it will never succeed on the desktop.
I can't even understand why someone modded you up. Talking about how Slashdot is pro-Linux anti-MS always makes someone get modded up, even though the exact opposite of what they claim is true.
Before I have my coffee in the morning, *I* couldn't pass the Turing test.
This page accidentally left blank
While "People think" is a perfectly good Axiom, it isn't appropriate in this case. Given that nobody is going to derive a definition of Intelligence from the Axioms of Number Theory, or any other existing formal system, we will have to apply Inductive Logic (rather than Deductive) to come up with one.
The core of every system of Inductive Logic is always some variation of the rule: (IF A THEN B) ENTAILS (IF B THEN A). The entailment may be to some degree of probability or fuzzy-truth, depending on the system, but that rule is always there. It is the formalization of the idea "If it happens that way some of the time, maybe it always happens that way."
Your Axiom "People think" could be expressed as: IF (X is a Person) THEN (X thinks). Using the rule of inductive logic, we would could then conclude that IF (X thinks) THEN (X is a person), which means that only people can think. Obviously not something you want as an Axiom.
Even if you want to say "but I don't intend to use inductive logic", you're still going to confuse people, because it is the way most people think. If I tell someone that both of these statements are true: "If it is raining, then I am wet", and "I am wet", and then as them if this means it is raining, most people will say "yes, of course!".
Turing recognized this problem, which is why he postulated a new Axiom for thinking: IF (X passes the Turing Test) THEN (X thinks), or, more simply "Things that pass the Turing Test think."
Whether you agree with the Axiom or not, he has the right approach. Several alternate Axioms have been proposed, and each have a following in the world of AI:
Anything which acts like a human thinks.
Anything which acts rationally thinks.
Anything which can autonomously generate models of its environment like a human does thinks.
Anything which can autonomously generate accurate models of its environment thinks.
I'm sure there are more that I don't know about.
Obviously, all of these are very vague Axioms, and different projects in AI investigate different aspects of them. The most common variation on the research is changing the domain of thinking. It could be argued that we have already made computers that can think about chess, checkers, network optimization, and many microdomains. What we haven't made is a computer that can think about the politics, the world, or the Turing Test.
Arguably most important, we have not made a computer that can think about its own thoughts. The ability to self-reflect is what some consider the core of intelligence. If you believe the computer is a wet machine, then you likely accept that consciousness is the ability of that machine to represent nearly any aspect of its own operation.
At the moment, my internal model of myself says that I am hungry, so I'm going to go eat.
Engineers often fail because, well, most of them seem more like a computer than a simple chatterbot does.
As much as this seems like a joke post, I was actually told this by an AI professor who had some simple chatterbots pass the Turing Test in his lab, and realized that there was a problem with using Electrical Engineering graduate students as the "Real People".
I took a look around and found some quantum simulators: http://www.dcs.ex.ac.uk/~jwallace/simtable.htm