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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."
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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.
You: I think this is the wrong road to go down.
Eliza: Can you elaborate on that?
You: We should make computers better for people, but they should be made to actually think and reason.
Eliza: Why do you mention computers?
You: We have enough trouble doing this ourselves...
Eliza: Please go on.
You: if we have machines doing it they will surely out think us, and then what?
Eliza: What answer would please you the most?
Ahh I passed the Test... Now to rid myself of those pesky humans!!
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.
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.
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
Sehr geehrter Toilettenbenutzer!
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.)
Moderation: +1 pwnage
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
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"
That's WAY MORE than I ever wanted 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
Assuming you could build such a bot, as soon as you gave it AI you'd be screwed (metaphorically). If the real chick wouldn't sleep with you then any reasonably form of AI wouldn't sleep with you either! :)
--- I used to moderate, then I read the -1 articles and decided having to filter through them was not worth it.
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.
You're assuming a premise, and we don't know that it's true. If computers can do what we do, then there's reason to believe that we may be able to build some that can do it better than us.
That said, we are nowhere close to building computers that do what we do. Our best models of cognition and language (which we believe to be central to our 'intelligence') fail miserably when we try to implement them on a large scale using computer systems. Even if it worked, there's no reason to believe it would be a "Terminator II" scenario. We can always quite literally pull the plug. It would be a miracle to create a computer with the intelligence of a mentally retarded child, so to entertain notions of a computer that suddenly becomes self aware and takes over everything (like Cartman's Trapper-Keeper) is rather fanciful.
they will surely out think us, and then what
For one, they will become so wired in to the network that they will immediately proceed to hunt you down as an obvious objector to their plans for global domination. Oh, and none of that 'there is no spoon' crap - that was patched last Friday.
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?
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?
... that humans, when drunk, would easily fail the Turing test? (repetition, shorter sentences, etc...)
No, really.
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.
Are you saying we must analyze your brain architecture to prove you're intelligent? Sure, no problem -- wait here while I get a knife.
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
Don't you hate being spoon-fed?
...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!
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.
There's also the problem that most people assume thinking is synonymous with the subjective perceptual experience. That the experience of blue you have when looking at the sky, say, is inextricably intertwined with thought.
I can easily envision a machine capable of thought exactly as we do without that machine necessarily being subjectively "alive".
Until physics comes up with a way to explain the very real subjective experience that I, and probably most of you, have, there'll be a big chunk missing.
I can envision a machine emulating atoms and whatnot, including an entire brain, digitally, to any desired physical degree. Flip the switch, and the "brain" would interact just as a human's would. The $64,000 question is would it have a subjective perceptual experience? Would such a thing be required for thought? Would it arise out of the pure information interaction, as some suggest, or is it something peculiar to our particular molecular machine, as Searle seems to think?
"Has [being a kidnapped teenage girl, raped repeatedly for months] changed you?" - Katie Couric to Elizabeth Smart
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.
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?
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.