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."

Comments

Re:Why?

[curtisk]

hahaha, the only way that could have been more funny is if you had an Eliza /. account...just to complete the gag!

Along the same lines, the bots in the recent Chatter box challenge show some improvements in the whole chatbot world, but some are just like the ol' Eliza

Re:Why?

[CriX]

Although I didn't RTFA, I can say that the Turing test is pretty useless for determining machine intelligence.

I've argued over at Kurzweil AI and AI-forum.org in several discussions for the need to analyze brain (biological or not) architecture to ultimately conclude if something is actually INTELLIGENT. The need for this comes from the many brute force and somewhat cleverly written chat bots like Alan that attempt to appear intelligent.

I hope everyone here will check out these two forums because there are lots of interesting topics that require the attention of the global nerd community. And there are plenty of wacko theories to smite too(especially on Kurzweil's site.)

Re:This just in...

[Anonymous Coward]

Holy shit man, you're going to make that joke as dead as the "In Soviet Russia". Take a look at this posting history. How much for a karma lap dance?

the death of Alan Turing, and intolerance

[Submarine]

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.

Re:a few comments

[psaltes]

There is a good analysis of Searle's argument by Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett, in the Mind's I, where they include Searle's original chinese room article plus their own commentary. I think it might help to sort out the questions that are under discussion in this thread. It is an opposing point of view to Searle.

Re:Why?

[Wandering Idiot]

They say we only use 2% of our mental capacity, so what if we could build a machine that was better then ourselves?

Perhaps "they" and you only use 2 percent (it must be shrinking! The *usual* wrong-assed estimate is 10%), but the rest of us use all of our brains, just like any remotely reasonable organism. Now, if you had said that, on average, only 10% of our neurons are firing at any *one time*, it might have been a bit less ludicous. But such would probably be true of any complex cognitive system, including advanced computer systems. After all, if a mind can only be *completely* active (i.e. firing all of its neurons, or switching all of its gates) or inactive, that makes it a two-state system, which is a wee bit on the simplistic side for a conscious intelligence [/sarcasm]. Certainly, if it's possible to build a computers system that's even a wee bit smarter than any human (and whether or not that is possible is unknown at present), it follows that the computer should be able to build something smarter than itself, and so on, which could have drastic effects on the furture of humanity, for good or ill. See singularity theory. Personally, I think it's a bit too early to be worrying about our coming robotic evil overlords yet, as AI's aren't likely to progress much beyond glorified Eliza clones for a while. (Of course, I could be wrong... DUM DUM DUMMMM...)

Look, Turing proposed the 'test' as a joke

[hqm]

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.