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Turing's Original Test Played First Time Ever
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."
And it was proposed by a gay man, too. Turing had some preconceptions on which would be a more difficult test -- I think he assumed some traditional stereotypes about women being more emotional or social than men, meaning that imitating a woman should be harder than imitating a man.
For an amusing discussion of the Turing test and gender, see Douglas Hofstadter's "A Coffeehouse Conversation on the Turing Test" -- it's in Metamagical Themas.
I don't think he ever said that an agent is not intelligent if it fails the Turing test. He said the agent is intelligent if it passes. The other way around is unfalsifiable. In other words, I don't think you could ever prove that something is not intelligent. (e.g. No, that rock isn't mindless, it's just sleeping).
From the link, got to love this conversation.
Strangely, it seems only to willing to broadcast the virtues of Lynx.
The idea is that a computer is intelligent if it can hold a conversation with a human such that it is indistinguishable from a conversation with a real human.
RIDICULOUS.
Have you ever actually tried talking to one of these bots (including ALICE)? It is very easy to know that you're not talking to a human. Exceptionally easy. The Loebner Prize judges consistently grant the bots handicaps, acting as if they're actually being fooled. Obviously they're not, and the AI community just wants people to think that it's more advanced than it really is. Unfortnately, some members of the public *are* fooled by that.
The problem is in the Turing Test itself. It assumes that the measure of intelligence is humanoid conversational ability. I strongly disagree with that. Conversation ability is no measure of intelligence. Just for an example, I am exceptionally intelligent (statistically), but I am a poor conversationalist. Casual small-talk has always bewildered me. If I entered myself into the Loebner contest, they might think I'm a bot. Hell, ALICE might accuse me of being a bot.
Anyone who's taken an IQ test will recall that every last question has something to do with pattern recognition. You'll also recall that you were not asked to respond to any conversational questions. That's because invariant pattern recognition abilities (in a loose sense -- this also includes memory/learning and inductive reasoning) are the true mark of intelligence, and this is nearly undisputed. If they really want to test how intelligent a program is, they need to test its patern recognition ability.
Take this program -- http://www.stanford.edu/~dil/invariance/ -- for example. It's gone largely unnoticed, yet it is concrete proof of a huge breakthrough in computer intelligence. This is a little Matlab demo of a very abstract multi-layer intelligence algorithm. In this particular implementation, it is taught a set of small images. Then you can play "Pictionary" with it, drawing shapes and have it recognize them. You may say that this is unremarkable, that shape-recognition is a trivial algorithmic matter unrelated to intelligence. But the author noticed that he could draw shapes "incorrectly" -- like, the little duck picture, except with its head missing, or alphabetical symbols rotated or flipped -- and the program still recognized them. (It failed a few times, but in situations where the shape is so mangled that I would have probably failed too. How's that for a Turing test?) And this program's genius lies in not what it does, but how it does it. All of its functionality is completely abstract. It is a pattern recognizer, not a bitmap-tracer, and there are no hard-coded routines for checking if the image is flipped, rotated, etc.
This is what Palm/Handspring founder Jeff Hawkins (also the founder of new neuroscience startup Numenta, http://www.numenta.com/) calls "Real Intelligence," to distinguish it from the failed Artificial Intelligence effort. He feels that the right way to make computers intelligent is not to have them outwardly imitate human behavior, but to internally function the way the mind really works. Anyone interested should check out his book, On Intelligence http://www.onintelligence.org/. You'll wonder why you ever believed the AI hype.
Artificial Intelligence is a sham, by its very nature. Real Intelligence will be the way of the future.
Signature.
The idea is that a computer is intelligent if it can hold a conversation with a human such that it is indistinguishable from a conversation with a real human. RIDICULOUS. Really. I've met way too many people that have so much trouble stringing together a sentence over the phone that they would fail a turing test.
from http://jabberwacky.com/
Me: That doen't make sense.
Jabberwacky: You don't make any sense.
Me: Sorry.
Jabberwacky: It's ok, you are doing your best.
Me: No, I am sorry because now all your base are belong to us!
Jabberwacky: Don't be sorry about that, embrace it!
Me: Thank you, I WILL!!
Jabberwacky: Stop talking about it and do it.
"Some of the worst mistakes in my life have been haircuts." - Jim Morrison