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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."
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.
just because it can pass the turing test does not mean the machine demonstrates real intelligence!
But it will demonstrate that past a certain point we won't know the difference between real intelligence and something attempting to appear intelligent.
in fact, just what is intelligence / conciousness? if we can't define it, how can we hope to produce it?
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?
"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.
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.
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No, actually they can't You think they can, but that's because you can determine patterns in human behaviors, something computers can't do very well, yet.
Sure, writing a bot the does first post is easy.
We are talking about a conversation here, or even better a debate over a topic that requires evaluating new concepts on the fly.
We will know we are getting some where when we can gt a computer to changes it's mind on something from a conversation.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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.
Well, you do have to admit that even humans are born with some very basic instincts, such as the desire to suckle when hungry, closing their hand when something is touching their palm, cry when they're uncomfortable (hungry, wet, tired, in pain) as well as the involuntary actions such as cardiopulminary functions.
That said, I would agree that you shouldn't have to give a machine anything more than basic resources to begin its process of learning, but you do need to give it something a rudimentary kernel to get it kick-started from the state of being an inanimate pile of silicon. From that kernel, it should be able to learn from its surroundings, build its own OS and begin to interact with its surroundings.
But there is a genetic basis for the fundamental structure of the brain...
True, we have to essentially figure out how to USE the signals we get from our senses, but the brain already has the basic structure to interpret your senses and do gross movement. (Or did your baby not move it's arms and legs when she was born?)
Therefore, the correct analogy would be the hardware necessary (including BIOS) AND the basic OS. You don't tell your AI how to "read" the internet, but you do tell it how to interpret the signals. So your AI knows that there is something out there and then figures out what it means and starts using it productivly.
Also remember that the "hardware" for the AI could be entierly software based...
You have an excellent point but are taking the analogy too far.
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
> "I have always regarded this leap of logic as the biggest problem with the Turing test."
;)
But that's the point - it's not a leap of logic, it's a sufficient (and necessary?) condition for a proposed equivalence between humans and machines that Alan Turing used. Either you agree with Turing or you don't, but it's not a fallacy unless someone tries to sneak it in as a premise.
> "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."
Absolutely. Let's assume for the sake of discussion we had some way to guarantee that they are functionally the same.
> "An AI could simulate a human perfectly, down to the smallest detail, and still have no actual intelligence whatsoever."
Well, that obviously depends on your personal beliefs regarding intelligence. Since I'm a Turing Functionalist, I disagree on this point - an identical machine necessarily has an identical intelligence.
> "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)"
If the animation was in fact a simulated world where all the other actors functioned as they should, then I'd argue that it is indeed a plane in that world. It's not the Test itself you're arguing with so much as the Functionalism part.
> "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."
Sure, sure. It's just that we consider humans to be intelligent (sometimes I wonder why, etc. etc., but in this context we just do), so if we can show equivalence between a machine and a human, that's sufficient to show the machine to be intelligent. Failure of this test does not necessarily mean the machine is not intelligent via equivalence with some alien creature. (I guess that answers my parenthetical question at the top about whether the Test was a necessary condition.)
> "As others have pointed out, we need a better definition of intelligence. "Able to mimic a human" just doesn't cut it."
After the above, will you understand when I say that I think it does?
Evidently, the key to understanding recursion is to begin by understanding recursion. The rest is easy.