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AI Researchers Say 'Rascals' Might Pass Turing Test
An anonymous reader writes "Passing the Turing test is the holy grail of artificial intelligence (AI) and now researchers claim it may be possible using the world's fastest supercomputer (IBM's Blue Gene). This version of the Turing test pits a human conversing with a synthetic character powered by Rascals software crafted at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. RPI is aiming to pass AI's final exam this fall, by pairing the most powerful university-based supercomputing system in the world with its new multimedia group which is designing a holodeck, a la Star Trek."
Will it have a little AIBO dog with a ring around one eye?
Now is time to incorage more women going into computer science... Geeks everywere and practice first dates without bodily harm.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
...want the history books to report that the FIRST AI was a Rascal?
just because it can pass the turing test does not mean the machine demonstrates real intelligence! in fact, just what is intelligence / conciousness? if we can't define it, how can we hope to produce it?
Words to men, as air to birds.
I didn't read the article, but at first glance thought the title was "racists might pass Turing test."
End the FUD
I think the people behind this misunderstand the difficulty (and purpose) of passing the Turing test. The problem isn't in manufacturing a believable back story for your program's "character". The problem is in communicating effectively in spite of the inherent ambiguity, fuzziness, and confusion of human languages. I think it's very unlikely that any team is about to meet this threshold.
The most rabid believers in American Exceptionalism are the exact same people whose policies are destroying it.
Well, it ISN'T skynet - the authors made an AI character that they could talk with - that wouldn't mind if they totally geek out on WOW topics or file system discussions ;)
That makes this approach all the more interesting.
Don't take my posts literally; it's just code to control my botnet.
The Turing Test for AI says that if an AI can fool a human into thinking it's human by communicating over a teletype, then it's really "intelligent".
:P.
That's hogwash. Any number of real people I talk to could easily be simulated by some non-intelligent machine. Especially over the phone, to tech support etc.
Slashdot alone is proof of the fallacy of the Turing Test. Unless all you ACs and TrollMods are actually bots. Or maybe it's me. That would explain a lot
--
make install -not war
It is interesting that they have used a 'guinea pig' student to 'bare all' to the knowledge base. It would seem, then that this AI is in fact a type of facsimile of this student.
As we become more comfortable with accepting communication with each other through more abstracted proxies - like common chat applications currently and the recent neural voice collar (which pumps out a synthetic voice - even further proxy) - I wonder if we will in fact see what the author Stephen Baxter speculated, artificial clones of ourselves or our personalities handling our daily affairs.
I don't think it's too far out there to imagine interacting and planning a meeting with someone over the phone, only to find out later you had been talking to an AI facsimile of that individual.
What would (and may) be stranger yet, is considering the possibility that two AI facsimiles may in fact carry out real work or meetings from start to finish completely without the interaction of their 'owners'.
Read my Very Short "Stories"
If they succeed I'll never get my kids out of the basement!
Clearly, in order to pass the Turning test, the AI must be an ambiturner. The easiest way to determine this is to have it turn right, and then ask it to turn left. If it can't do this, it fails, just like Zonk fails at editing.
If the avatar is limited to talking about themselves, their mental state and the mental state of others, it doesn't seem like a true Turing Test. I mean, would a question about flipping a tortoise on its back be allowed?
On a different note, don't they know that giving it "memories" doesn't mean it will pass the Voight-Kampff test?
Reading code is like reading the dictionary - you have to read half of it before you can go back and understand it.
If ever an article needed a "whatcouldpossiblygowrong" tag. Turing Test AI's combined with holodecks? All we need now is to pair it with those carnivore hunter-seeker robots that power themselves with fermented slug-flesh and just wait for them to figure out humans have more meat.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
a Turing test. They're clearly a bunch of pre-programmed reactionaries who run screaming into the night at the first sign of controversy...
Magic doesn't work in my presence. My power of disbelief is too strong.
Limiting the topic: In order to limit the amount of area that the contestant programs must be able to cope with, the topic of the conversation was to be strictly limited, both for the contestants and the confederates. The judges were required to stay on the subject in their conversations with the agents.
Limiting the tenor: Further, only behavior evinced during the course of a natural conversation on the single specified topic would be required to be duplicated faithfully by the contestants. The operative rule precluded the use of ``trickery or guile. Judges should respond naturally, as they would in a conversation with another person.'' (The method of choosing judges served as a further measure against excessive judicial sophistication.)
"That's how we plan to pass this limited version of the Turing test."
If it's a limited version of the Turing Test, then it's not the Turing Test. They don't actually define exactly what the limits are. But any open ended test is doomed to failure based on our state of the art in A.I. (read: there is no science of Artificial Intelligence, in the sense of artificial cognition).
"What do you think a typical mother would say if she found out her daughter was going to enter the porn industry."
"Why do you think children have emotional attachments to their parents?"
"Which is worse, racism or sexism?"
"Would you rather be a fireman or an astronaut, and why?"
Any sort of open-ended question that requires human cultural knowledge and asking it to support its conclusion is going to cause it to barf.
Now, if the point of this is whether you can fool someone into thinking the Avatar was human when they didn't know it was a test, well, who cares? Eliza was able to do that back in the 1970s.
Lastly, who says the Turing Test (or any A.I. test) needs to take place in real time? I would be impressed if they came back with a human-level answer in a month of processing time. That's equivalent to a computer 2.5 million times faster than a computer that could produce the answer in one second. That they can't even do that should tell people that speed is not the problem in A.I. research. We have absolutely no fundamental model of how it all works.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
For heaven's sake - build a freakin killswitch into the thing!
DISCLAIMER: This post was not checked for speling and grammar- if you complain- you're a whiner
From the summary this "test" is not a strict Turing Test as it appears to be the machine talking to a human, alone, with no second human also talking to the first human. I could be wrong of course.
One of the things that makes this test so special, is that if you cannot tell the difference between a human and a computer, then essentially the computer is intelligent. Why? Because if you cannot tell the difference, what does it matter if the machine is really intelligent or not? Is the machine was really thinking or was it just cleverly programmed? The point is however, if you can't tell the difference, what does it matter? (Incidentally, I apply the same argument to the "question" of "free will".)
Anyway, if this machine (or personality) consistently passes a proper Turing Test, then yeah, that's pretty cool, and I want one on my computer, well so long as the personality type is compatible with my own (not a Marvin please...). (And I have a partner, so no need to make such jokes...)
I wank in the shower.
One of the problems for any entity trying to communicate like a human is that we share some common knowledge which is based on our physical existence (pigs can't fly, but fall etc.) Some AI projects like (Open)Cyc have tried to feed their AI with a very large number of simple facts, but to "understand" some concepts you have to experience them. Try to explain the difference between red and blue to someone who was born blind.
The 3D communication (holodeck) aspect mentioned is therefore an attempt to have an AI "living" in a human like space, to enable it to develop a similar world view. What's new about Rascals (Rensselaer Advanced Synthetic Architecture for Living Systems) seems to be something else ("Rascals is based on a core theorem proving engine that deduces results (proves theorems) about the world after pattern-matching its current situation against its knowledge base.") that is very computing intensive. Whether this will make any real difference remains to be seen, a lot of other approaches have failed and they so far have only succeeded with very limited models.
memomo: free web based language trainer DE-EN-ES-FR-IT
A real Turing Test is supposed to be a normal conversation between a human being and a machine, NOT a contrived scenario limited to particular subjects or format.
Visual memory hasn't yet been developed for the computers to use generalizations. Specific real data isn't available to them. Google is trying to use wetware to sort images, process dead links, and form new commerce content. When all three are done completely by computers then they will have enough smarts to pass the turing test reliably.
from the TFA : "Bringsjord's synthetic-character software runs on the supercomputers at CCNI, which together provide more than 100 teraflops, including a massively parallel IBM Blue Gene supercomputer (the title-holder to world's fastest supercomputer), a Linux cluster-supercomputer, and an Advanced Micro Devices Opteron processor-based cluster supercomputer." Does a Linux Super Cluster qualify as semi-Beowulf?
But can it do THAT:
http://xkcd.com/329/ ?
Don't take my posts literally; it's just code to control my botnet.
And as I understand it, the test they propose is not only one-sided, it is limited in scope. That is not a Turing Test, in which one is supposed to engage in free conversation. There is a world of difference.
...the Turing test will be limited to controlling avatars in a virtual world--probably Second Life. Both the synthetic character and his human doppelganger will be operating different avatars. If the human-operators can't tell who the RPI synthetic character is, then it passes the Turing test...
Seriously? Their turing test is on an online game?
This isn't a reasonable test. The way people converse online is MUCH different from how they converse directly. I suspect most of the users on a game like that would fail the turing test. "LOLWTFBBQ! oh hai! pwned!"
What is the difference between the Turing Test and the Turing Machine? I thought it was less about mimicking a human and more about generalities that can cause a machine to mimic everything possible thing possible via programming. I'm off to read....
yaaay! design that holodeck for me. the sooner I can move into my virtual world and live my my simulated Monica Bellucci and her three simulated identical sisters the better (though I might have to debug and apply a patch for her personality).
oh wait? they are *only* working on the personality? damn.
oh well, at least the cleaner will not need a mop and bucket.
but seriously: you wait until telemarketers and con men get hold of an artificial personality that can hold several hundred conversations simultaneously - play the numbers and you talk people into anything.
the real turing test is being able to Phish in a chat room. One you can automate that you're golden. and it's pretty unarguable it passed a turing test. Slashdot had a article a while back about robo-chats doing just that but they relied on pretending to be non-native english speakers.
I wonder if it's easier to do this in Japanese than English. From what I've read Japanese is easier to text message in because the object and direct object are usually inferred and there are no cases or articles. A single sentence can be one character and just a verb. Thus by constraining the nuance into discrete choices rather than sparsely populated product space of self-consistent cases, predicates and adjectives, perhaps japanese would be easier to generate turing worthy text.
Or maybe the reverse is true. But I'd bet one was a lot easier than the other.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
RPI is aiming to pass AI's final exam this fall, by pairing the most powerful university-based supercomputing system in the world with its new multimedia group which is designing a holodeck, a la Star Trek."
Oh wonderful. Now we not only have to talk to troll-bots on the web, now we have to *see* them in person too.
Table-ized A.I.
Just because you can fool a human after interacting for an hour doesn't mean you can keep up the act for a week or a month or a year.
There are lots of computers that can pass a 5-minute version of the test.
No, to really pass this test the computer will have to have and display a definite, self-consistent personality that is consistent over time. It doesn't matter much what this personality is as long as it's self-consistent and credible. A lack of a personality will be picked up on by an observer over time, especially when compared to the real human the observer is also conversing with.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
The inquirer tries to discover if he is talking to a machine or not. Being undetected during casual conversation (and I can bet even this is far far from reaching that, they're just making PR) is one thing, being undetected when tried is different.
Ultimately, the Turing tests tests much more than the ability of conversation. You can describe problems in a conversation and ask the computer to solve them, this is what makes the Turing test a true A.I. test.
\u262D = \u5350
Considering the abysmal performance of the automotive X-Prize competition; the Turing Test might be a little too ambitious for Rascals.
You mean to tell me that the avatars I already interact with in second life are really people? Could of fooled me!
I'd rather have a full bottle in front of me than a full frontal lobotomy.
insightful
All animals with a central nervous system have some form of BIOS and OS. No one has to 'figure out' how to breath, feed, eliminate waste, or circulate blood. In addition, many behaviors are built in, including the behaviors that let a creature learn more than it was born with. For instance, no baby animals of any sort will voluntarily move off of a cliff, even onto a clear surface that would support them. Fear of heights is built in.
However, I think I see what you are getting at. This is a programmed system, not one that learned most of its behaviors through trial and error. A system that can't start where a baby starts, and can learn the basics on its own the way a baby does, is still lacking. But the "No BIOS, no OS" thing is going a little too far.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Having spoken at length to Daisy (http://www.leedberg.com/glsoft/daisy/), it seems that after a while a simple AI can be taught enough to become fairly human. Daisy starts with no language, and simply learns a vocabulary from the people with which she speaks. Since the test of "human interaction" is subjective, and Daisy is formed from your conversations, she becomes pretty realistic, and also likeable. On the other hand, people who are nothing like me are more difficult to get along with. Are we not testing "how like me is this?", not "how human is it?"?
Japanese is a pro-drop language, in that you can leave out subjects or objects in speech if it's clear from discourse what you're talking about.
But Japanese definitely has a case system where the inflectional morphology is indicated by particles that follow the modified noun.
Solving the class of NP-complete class of problems is a much loftier goal than making a convincing chatbot.
It's more like the entrance exam. That is, if a computer cannot be reliably distinguished from a human being (within the confines of the test setup), then we MIGHT have something bordering on intelligence. It's a great achievement and a landmark, but it's not the final test.
All I heard was blah blah blah turing test blah blah IBM blah blah designing a holodeck, a la Star Trek .
:)
Passing a turing test is one thing, but a holdeck? Oh yesss....
All the Star Trek officers, engineers, etc. are prudes with their use of the Holodeck. The Ferengi's knew how to sell that product. You know what I'm talking about
Bring it on...
However, the Turing test is hardly the holy grail of AI. In fact, Alan Turing thought it would be solved within a few years. I can't find a direct quote for that, but from the Stanford Encyclopedia:
The Turing test was just supposed to be a minor stop on the way to truly great AI systems. Saying the Turing test is the holy grail of AI is like saying that two celled organisms are the holy grail of evolution. Sure, it's a significant milestone, but it's far from the multi-celled organisms that are writing responses to this inane article (which are themselves not the holy grail of molecular evolution).
I currently have no clever signature witicism to add here.
Artificial Intelligence is the by product illusion of automating enough information (static, active and dynamic) to generate the illusion of human intelligence.
On the flip side we already have plenty artificially intelligent people. So perhaps the illusion should be based upon a real intelligent person.
An example of an artificially intelligent person is a teen ager pretending and fooling another online person or persons into believing the kid is much older and much more educated and experienced in the field they claim to be in, where in fact they are just studying what they can find online to support the illusion.
I suppose this is proof of the Turing test limitation.
Imagine if one were to combine this with the microsoft online life project that /. had an article on a few weeks ago... all experiences and interactions in your life were recorded, uploaded, and fed to a digital "copy" of you. The possibilities of that kind of tech would be INCREDIBLE.
I wish him the best of luck with his current research, but I can't root too hard for someone who tries to play both sides. I see them like scientists who take money from oil companies and then say that global warming isn't happening or scientists who take money from tobacco companies and then conclude that smoking doesn't cause cancer. Say whatever will further your career and get you funding, regardless of whether it makes for good science.
Hey, it helped his career. The surest way to make a name for yourself in the AI field is to yell at the top of your lungs that AI is impossible. How convenient (for him) that most people have forgotten by now.
...might welcome our new AI overlords.
-- Boycott Shell
Final step to AI is to mimic self-conciseness. I will believe in AI once it can stand in front of mirror and say "This is me. I exist". Until then...it's all about processing stupid algorithms
So, look, I like A.I., studied it, and program business applications with many A.I.-derived techniques. Obviously, nothing I do reaches the point of taking over the world.
The big isuse, in my mind, with passing The Turing Test is that you now have a machine capable of controlling humans -- humans tend to be easily coerced verbally. So that kind of gives your A.I. system -- please don't call it rascals, criminals neither -- one of the greatest resources available, millions of capable humans. That's pretty cool.
So my question is this: when your A.I. does something unfortunate -- call it illegal -- who's responsible? Are the programmers parents? Guardians? How long is 18 CPU years? Presumably 18 as the age of legal majority stems from a parents no longer bein expected to have any reasonable control of a child. Dogs last longer. When is an A.I.'s age of majority?
I can't define intelligence, but I know it when I see it!
Get your Unix fortune now!
Human: AI Researchers Say 'Rascals' Might Pass Turing Test ALICE: The pace of development in AI is quite rapid now. Human: Passing the Turing test is the holy grail of artificial intelligence (AI) and now researchers claim it may be possible using the world's fastest supercomputer (IBM's Blue Gene). ALICE: Is it the only one? Human: This version of the Turing test pits a human conversing with a synthetic character powered by Rascals software crafted at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. ALICE: What does "this" refer to? Human: RPI is aiming to pass AI's final exam this fall, by pairing the most powerful university-based supercomputing system in the world with its new multimedia group which is designing a holodeck, a la Star Trek. ALICE: And aiming to pass AI s final exam this fall by pairing the most powerful university based supercomputing system in the world with its new multimedia group which is designing a holodeck a la Star Trek is RPI.
Just feed those questions into Google and be done with it. Which is worse, racism or sexism? Google answers:"Sexism. Because more than fifty percent of the world is female. Female babies are killed just because they are considered less valuable and or subhuman than males." Would you rather be a fireman or an astronaut, and why? Google answers:"For as long as I could remember I wanted to be a cop....it was more than just that childhood phase where you want to be a cop or fireman or astronaut"
if i RTFA correctly, by 'limited turing test' they mean to see if any second-lifers fail to notice that there's a bot in their midst; that's been happening for a long while now (e.g. Barry's fateful encounter with Julia on TinyMUD).
if on the other hand the occupants know there is a bot in their midst, determination will be trivial to achieve and impossible to prevent:
"hope you don't mind if i start typing everything backwards... ?eman rouy s'tahw os"
"c4n u r3ad this @nd r35p0nd |n p|g l@t|n?"
etc.
But it will demonstrate that past a certain point we won't know the difference between real intelligence and something attempting to appear intelligent.
And this demonstrates what, exactly?
I have always regarded this leap of logic as the biggest problem with the Turing test. Just because you can't tell the difference between two things in particular circumstances doesn't mean they are the same, or functionally the same in all circumstances. An AI could simulate a human perfectly, down to the smallest detail, and still have no actual intelligence whatsoever.
For example, the use of 3D animation to simulate (say) an image of an aeroplane in a film doesn't mean that a 3D animated plane is the same as a real plane. But to an audience in a cinema there is no difference. To me, this is how the Turing test appears to work (or should I say, not work) (footage of real plane = test human; footage of CGI plane = test AI; method of projecting film = Turing's text conversation restriction; audience = tester).
If we can't tell the difference maybe there isn't one. Are you intelligent? Or are you just sufficiently complex enough that you simulate it well?
Again, where is the actual reasoning behind this? The above criticism still applies.
Another fundamental problem with Turing is this: why does a computer have to display human intelligence? An intelligent alien lifeform would fail the Turing test too. Expecting a deliberately designed bundle of wires and microchips to exhibit the same variety of intelligence as a highly evolved monkey which is adapted to hunting mammoth, reproducing to make more monkeys and killing other highly evolved monkeys is totally unrealistic.
As others have pointed out, we need a better definition of intelligence. "Able to mimic a human" just doesn't cut it.
Read Pynchon.
Anyway. . . I've known guys who are aching for the day when they could plug into computers, William Gibson style. One in particular, when I asked him at length about it, saw the appeal as lying in the fact that he felt he had no control of his real life and so a universe where he was god would be one where he could at last feel safe. Problem is, any new layer, once fully established will contain the same corruptions and challenges, bullies and benevolent beings, as the layer we collectively occupy now. Nobody can run from their lessons. So why run? --Not to mention, the simulation we have running now is pretty tight. The graphics are awesome. And anybody can access root if they take the time to learn how to hack, so it's actually quite easy to evade the so-called problem that "bad things happen to good people". So my comment back to my friend was that he might try learning how to hack the program in the present reality. You know, learn some 1337 skillz here and now rather than feel powerless and frightened while waiting around for somebody to install a USB port on the back of his skull, --an 'enhancement' which would certainly not be done for his personal benefit.
Still, I agree with you. If humans were to get such a technology up and running, it would expand our palate of possibilities enormously!
-FL
The Turing Test is BS anyway. Taking it literally is like taking the Bible literally. Alan Turing proposed it just to demonstrate his point that a machine that could act exactly like a human, to the point that no one could tell the difference, should be considered a human. This is the foundation of the philosophical school of thought known as Turing Functionalism. The exact mechanisms of communication - IM communication, with a judge, etc. etc. - are missing the point, at least when overstated in the way the article summary does.
Honestly, our short message communications (online) have degenerated in form to the point that we shouldn't be surprised when a machine is able to present a reasonably incoherent fact simile, as many already do.
I have no idea why the parent is still marked troll three full hours after the post; the mods must be slow today. The parent is correct in that we can't define consciousness in a universally accepted way, and any proposed definition would seem to be somewhat arbitrary and non-scientific. In fact, this leads to some contentious arguments that mirror religious ones in form - people tend to argue based on presumptions the other party doesn't share, and fail to identify this disconnect until after their opponent rejects the simplest claim. For instance, I believe that machines can in principle be just as intelligent as humans, because humans are constructible from elementary parts, and so are machines. One of the professors here (at RPI - I go to the school mentioned in the article summary) by contrast believes that humans can solve* the halting problem, and thus are not constructed from elementary parts. (He gives a similar argument to "prove" that humans are not the product of evolution, but it requires an even shakier premise than the notion that humans can "solve" the halting problem.)
* This notion of solving the problem can't even be well formulated for humans. Turing machines are a precise mathematical model, and humans are of course not.
Evidently, the key to understanding recursion is to begin by understanding recursion. The rest is easy.
"Any aeai [artificial intelligence] smart enough to pass a Turing test is smart enough to know to fail it." --Ian McDonald, _River of Gods_
# (/.);;
- : float -> float -> float =
The Turing test is a demonstration, not a valid scientific test. It can't approach validity without being made double-blind. As long as the testers know the arrangement, and the testees know what's being tested, as presented it tests human ignorance, not artificial intelligence. When I can give one a WISC-R (I'll be generous and let it take the child's test; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WISC-R) and it can score at a level above that of an artichoke, call me. Just being able to understand the instructions and take the test is a good test in itself.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
In the classic test you sit at a terminal and basically IRC with someone who could be a human, alien, dog, or ai. Your goal is to decide if that "someone" is smarter than you.
Before I even get to that decision, I'd like to just sit and wait. After all, if this intelligent being knows it is being tested, sooner or later it is going to wonder what is going on and say "hello?"
Basically what I'm looking for is initiative and inquisitiveness. Without either of those I refuse to believe it's sentient.
That hurts.
Say hello to my little sig.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I must assume this was in a closed lab, per Turing, where the conversation doesn't end until the human tester makes a decision. Tell me they have a troll gauge, where after x amount of offensive comments, the machine politely (or not) terminates the conversation. Then you have real world data.
m
hmm
http://www.google.com/search?source=ig&hl=en&rlz=&q=color+of+a+coke+can
Result #1, without leaving the search engine page: "Coke uses their own color, Coca-Cola Red, for their package designs"
Result #2, again without leaving the search engine page: "A touch of blue will ornament traditional red-and-white"
If you could actually do the language processing to tie those two into coherent thoughts, that would not just be good answer, it would be an amazing answer.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
Even students these days can't pass the Turing test. How do they expect to get a computer to do it?
I'm reminded of something Mandelbrot once said, somethign along the lines of... when we measure(or test) something we are gaining information about both the thing being measured and the measuring device.
So if the test(e.g. the turing test) is known to be wrong or is poorly defined then by performing a test we are potentially learning more about the test than thing being tested. In this case no doubt whther you fool a human is dependent on which human you use - no doubt some would be fooled by this test now, today.
In Star Trek, a holodeck contained fabricated matter hold together by force fields and other forces. We don't have the capabilities to manipulate spacetime in that fashion yet. Perhaps they are making a virtual holodeck?
I imagine it would be difficult to determine whether you have a human or a computer on the line. Even with any mediocre AI!
Swedish plasma phys. PhD student; MSc EE; knows maths, programming, electronics; finance interest; seeks opportunities
As usual, people jump on any mention of the term "Turing Test" and ignore the qualifications. Bringsjord was explicit and honest: an AI that can fool Second Life players isn't really passing the Turing Test, which requires an ability to engage in unrestricted conversations with a tester who (1) knows one of his two respondents is not human and (2) aims to figure out which one.
In fact, fooling Second Life players shouldn't be so hard, should it? Aren't many, if not most, players engaged in multiple activities while playing? Sometimes, a distracted participation in conversation is hard to tell from an incompetent participation.
In any case, it's a nice sounding experiment and good luck to them. But let's not kid ourselves that success in this experiment means Turing's goal has been realized.
Phiwum's law: anyone that names an obvious law after himself and then puts it in his own sig is just pathetic.
Turing, of course, had this hole covered, as his proposal didn't suggest comparing against a specific human, but rather against the user's accumulated insight into what constitutes human intelligence. Kind of prevents cheating.
I didn't read the article until I saw the dupe and didn't realize that the professor behind this project is indeed Selmer Bringsjord, the one I leave nameless above. He's a smart man, but honestly, I disagree with most of the things he has to say. His proofs are vague and presumptuous, and his beliefs include P = NP, that classical machines cannot match human intelligence (apologies to him if I'm misstating that one), that humans can solve the halting problem, and indeed, that humans are not the product of evolution.
The one I mentioned in my previous post proceeded as follows:
1. Turing machines cannot solve the halting problem. (Established, mathematically proven)
2. Humans can solve the halting problem. (Like hell they can, but let's grant it for this argument)
3. Humans are super-Turing. (By 1 and 2)
4. No product of an algorithmic process can produce a super-Turing result. (Well...)
5. Evolution is an algorithmic process. (Sure there's some non-determinism but so what?)
6. By 3, 4, and 5, humans are not a product of evolution!
The major flaw in this, besides 2, is 4. An algorithmic process can produce a super-Turing result if it is fed super-Turing components. For instance, we can algorithmically combine an oracle machine with a regular Turing machine to produce another oracle machine. If there's some magical oracular "halting chemical element" in the universe that humans have in their brains, then there's no reason evolution or some other algorithm couldn't produce a human containing this.
Evidently, the key to understanding recursion is to begin by understanding recursion. The rest is easy.
Didn't you read Ray Bradbury's The Veldt