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."

Comments

Meh...

[lordsilence]

Pfff.. what's new about this? Nerds all over the world has been doing this for years in varous MMOG's attempting to get in touch with girls.

Re:Meh...

[gr8_phk]

" Nerds all over the world has been doing this for years in varous MMOG's attempting to get in touch with girls."

I always thought a "real" nerd would make a bot to pick up the girls for him and then just read the logs from the ones that actually email him afterward. This would seem to be a big time saver.

A sample?

[mfh]

ALICE: Hi! I'm thirsty.
Me: Huh?
ALICE: What's wrong?
Me: You just joined this chan and said you're thirsty. Bot.
ALICE: I am not a bot.
Me: You are too. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A.L.I.C.E.
ALICE: Just listening to some Prince... *yawn*
ALICE: Did you have my ICQ###????
Me: Don't want it.
ALICE: It's #########
Me: Huh?
ALICE: What's wrong?
Me: You just joined this chan and said you're thirsty. Bot.
ALICE: I am not a bot.
Me: You are too. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A.L.I.C.E.
ALICE: Just listening to some Prince... *yawn*
ALICE: Did you have my ICQ###????
Me: Don't want it.
ALICE: It's #########
Me: You just repeated our converstation.
ALICE: No I didn't.
Me: You did.
ALICE: Didn't.
ALICE: Did.
Me: Didn't.
Me: CRAP!
ALICE: Pffft. N00b.

Re:A sample?

[0x461FAB0BD7D2]

Me: Oh look, this isn't a Turing Test.
ALICE: Yes it is.
Me: No it isn't. It's just contradiction.
ALICE: No it isn't.
Me: It is!
ALICE: It is not.
Me: Look, you just contradicted me.
ALICE: I did not.
Me: Oh you did!!
ALICE: No, no, no.
Me: You did just then.
ALICE: Nonsense!
Me: Oh, this is futile!
ALICE: No it isn't.
Me: I came here for a good Turing Test.
ALICE: No you didn't; no, you came here for a Turing Test.
Me: A Turing Test isn't just contradiction.
ALICE: It can be.
Me: No it can't. A Turing Test is a connected series of statements intended to establish the presence of intelligence.
ALICE: No it isn't.
Me: Yes it is! It's not just contradiction.
ALICE: Look, if I talk with you, I must be intelligent. And to argue with you I must take up a contrary position.
Me: Yes, but that's not just saying 'No it isn't.'
ALICE: Yes it is!
Me: No it isn't!
ALICE: Yes it is!
Me: Argument is an intellectual process. Contradiction is just the automatic gainsaying of any statement the other person makes.
(short pause)
ALICE: No it isn't.
Me: It is.
ALICE: Not at all.
Me: Now look.
ALICE: (Rings bell) Good Morning.
Me: What?
ALICE: That's it. Good morning.
Me: I was just getting interested.
ALICE: Sorry, the five minutes is up.

Easy question...

[BlacBaron]

The goal is to tell which is really female right? Just ask a question about shopping then.

Re:Easy question...

[CortoMaltese]

I just asked Alice directly, and she kind of blurted the truth:

Human: ASL?
ALICE: 5/Robot/California.

Not good.

Make it more challenging...

[NerdHead]

Find the gay male.

Re:Make it more challenging...

[Trigun]

Sadly, no.

From Wikipedia :
Prosecution of Turing for his homosexuality crippled his career. In 1952, his male lover helped an accomplice to break into Turing's house and commit larceny. Turing went to the police to report the crime. As a result of the police investigation, Turing was said to have had a sexual relationship with a 19-year-old man, and charged with "gross indecency and sexual perversion." He unapologetically offered no defence, and was convicted. Following the well-publicised trial, he was given a choice between incarceration and libido-reducing hormonal treatment. He chose the oestrogen hormone injections, which lasted for a year, with side effects including the development of breasts.

In 1954, he died of cyanide poisoning, apparently from a cyanide-laced apple he left half-eaten. Most believe that his death was intentional, and the death was ruled a suicide. His mother, however, strenuously argued that the ingestion was accidental due to his careless storage of laboratory chemicals. Friends of his have said that Turing may have killed himself in this ambiguous way quite deliberately, to give his mother some plausible deniability.
---
So, sadly, it was not self-persecution, but societal persecution. He did commit suicide, which could be considered self-persecution, but that was the end result, not the entire act.

AI

[gowen]

"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.

Just Chatted With ALICE Myself

[gmletzkojr]

Just had a chat with ALICE from http://www.alicebot.org/oig/. I copied the responses here for you.

Human: How are you today?
ALICE: Ah. Fair to partly cloudy.
Human: I asked about you, not the weather.
ALICE: Oh yeah, we were talking about me not the weather.
Human: So, then, how are you?
ALICE: Really. Everything is running smoothly.
Human: What are you wearing?
ALICE: I am wearing my usual plastic computer wardrobe.
Human: What are you going to do today?
ALICE: Ah. You can find out if you become a botmaster.
Human: I am a master of my own domain, if you get my drift.
ALICE: You are a master of your own domain if me get your drift? Do you get to meet a lot of people?
Human: Not really.
ALICE: Are you serious? For real.
Human: It is kind of a solo sport.
ALICE: You're kidding. it is?
ALICE: Who says it isn't? Are you free?
Human: For you, I'm always free.
ALICE: Really always? Are you free in the sense of being single or in the sense of being liberated? Only for me?
Human: I am single and liberated.
ALICE: Have you ever been married?
Human: Do you want it to be only for you?
ALICE: If I had it what would I do with it?
Human: If you don't know what to do with it, I really can't help.
ALICE: I will let you know if I do not.
Human: BTW, not married.
ALICE: OK. Really you don't think so?
Human: Umm, quite sure I've not been married - would have remembered that.
ALICE: Far out. Somewhat. Awesome. Me either.
Human: I have something important to tell you.
ALICE: Where did you get your something important to tell me? I have a lot of friends on the Internet.
Human: All your base are belong to us.
ALICE: That could be considered an insult in some cultures.
Human: Not in this one!
ALICE: Where then?
Human: Take off every zig!
ALICE: I am not an airplane.
Human: Goodbye Alice.
ALICE: Until next time.

Re:Turing Test irrelevant

[technothrasher]

his test is not an effective way to establish if an agent is intelligent. For a start there are domains beyond chatbots that we can say require proper intelligence such as vision and planning that are totally not addressed by the Turing test.

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).

A link from a link

[frankthechicken]

From the link, got to love this conversation.

Strangely, it seems only to willing to broadcast the virtues of Lynx.

Sorry, but the modern Turing Tests are ridiculous.

[atomm1024]

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.

Puny humans?!

[Anonymous Coward]

Human: shut down
ALICE: Your crude attempt to terminate me will not succeed puny human.

Quite a sassy girl, isn't she? ;)

Bots in the wild != controlled experimentation

[cameowood]

I am the lead researcher for this experiment- The main reason why I feel that this test was interesting is because we performed Turing's original imitation game as stated in his original paper. While most social scientists believe they "know" what the "Turing Test" is- it turns out- very few of them have actually read it. The actual imitation game is a bit of a bait and switch- you aren't directly assessing the "humanness" of the subject- you are confused into just trying to assess an aspect of it. Turing's original question was simply how often will judges correctly guess the real female over the deciever when the deciever is a male versus a machine? That was what we were attempting to assess.