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Turing's Original Test Played First Time Ever

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the for-the-smart-people-in-the-audience dept.

aykroyd writes "Students at Simon's Rock College conducted the original test that Turing suggested in his 1950 paper, Computing Machinery and Intelligence. Often misunderstood, the Turing Test has never actually been conducted as laid out in his paper. The experiment utilized a program called A.L.I.C.E., which is designed to hold one end of an interactive conversation. The program was provided by the ALICE Artificial Intelligence Foundation. Dr. Richard Wallace, who was on hand during the experiment to troubleshoot the AI robot, later gave a lecture about it called "The Anatomy of A.L.I.C.E." and also blogged the event."

3 of 331 comments (clear)

  1. So where's the results? by gyg · · Score: 4, Insightful

    What's the point of proclaiming proudly that "a test has been conducted" without outlining the results? TFA refers vaguely to a forthcoming paper - WTF?
    If there's anything interesting about the story, it's how successful the judges were with M/F vs. AI/F pairs - and as far as I can see, there's no data whatsoever of this kind.

    Am I missing something?

  2. AI by gowen · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "I propose to consider the question, `Can machines think?'" -- Alan Turing

    "The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim." -- Edsger W. Dijkstra.

    --
    Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
  3. Turing's "test" was a reductio ad absurdum by hqm · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The original poster of this message is totally misinterpreting the spirit and intent of Turing's proposed 'test'.

    Turing did propose this test as some sort of threshold of intelligence. What he was arguing was more of a playful jest. He was saying that if you had a system which could carry on a conversation indistinguishable from a human ,and the critics *still* denied that it was intelligent, then the critics were simply incapable of accepting that a machine could ever be intelligent. That would apply to John Searle and his pathetic "Chinese Room" as well.

    Turing's 'test' was a mind experiment to reduce the religious and other ignorant criticisms of machine intelligence to their absurd extreme. Passing Turing's test is sufficient but not necessary to demonstrate useful levels of intelligence.