Slashdot Mirror
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?
...want the history books to report that the FIRST AI was a Rascal?
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.
You're right! They should call it "artificial intelligence" or something like that.
I'm not even sure it is actually passing the full Turing test. From the article I noticed one of the researchers saying: "That's how we plan to pass this limited version of the Turing test." Anyone know what he means by this being a "limited" version of the Turing test?
That makes this approach all the more interesting.
Don't take my posts literally; it's just code to control my botnet.
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"
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?
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
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.
Curiosity was framed, Ignorance killed the cat.
But can it do THAT:
http://xkcd.com/329/ ?
Don't take my posts literally; it's just code to control my botnet.
>|<*:=
An interesting point.
I suppose what we can do is produce something which carries out tasks which we consider intelligence necessary for - in that case does it really matter if it is intelligence, so long as the 'task' gets completed?
Be that task mathematics, logistics or writing smooth jazz.
I guess perhaps the problem has been that we've been looking for human-like intelligence for these tasks, when really we should be asking what does intelligence do. Instead of asking what intelligence is and how to make it, perhaps we should just be searching for ways to accomplish the tasks intelligence tackles so well.
During the early days of powered flight many found it difficult to give up the notion of flapping wings...after all, since everything that flew under it's own power used wings which flapped, flapping must be needed as well as wings. Rocketry might be an example of flying without wings or flapping.
I guess we can think something along these lines - it doesn't have to flap it's wings to fly.
Read my Very Short "Stories"
If they succeed, you'll never get me out of the basement.
I am not a crackpot.
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.
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.
I'm reading Slashdot => no. QED
Thank God for evolution.
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
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.
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.
My Turing machine was called "Artificial Insanity". I used to have a copy posted on the internet, but I ran out of room. It was so human that a friend of mine broke his keyboard it pissed him off so much.
I tackled the problem with two ideas: One, humans are stupid, crazy, defensive, argumentative, get drunk, tired, and stoned, and generally behave like... well they generally DON'T behave. Secondly, as it was designed on a Timex-Sinclair 1000 with only 16k of memory and no hard drive, it had to be really, really simple. So I had to resort to trickery to fool people.
One of these days I'm going to port it to javascript and post it.
Once I ran across a Turing machine on the net named "Alice" and had Art have a conversation with it. I think the two machines fell in love with each other! I posted the results at my now-defunct nerdy Quake site, you may still find it at archive.org, even if Google can't.
-mcgrew
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
I'd argue our brain and perhaps even our DNA is the equivalent of a BIOS and OS. Humans are even born with certain instincts amounting to preprogrammed instructions, breast-feeding being one of them. A computer with no BIOS or AI is basically a pile of plastic and silicon. There needs to be some foundation to build upon.
The conditions I'd put on AI would be that it has to be able to improvise and create. It has to be able to learn and develop independently of it's program. Instructions which dictate how it should develop or how to deal with specific situations are prohibited.
One thing I'd suggest is important is desire, the desire to feed, to move, to do something. This would spur to develop itself to fulfill its desires. Otherwise it's just going to sit there.
You're in the basement with his kids?
Play Command HQ online
Actually, Voight-Kampff tested for emotional responses (or lack thereof), not intelligence. I don't think there was ever a question as to whether or not replicants were intelligent.
Get your words right! A turing machine is a hypothetical computer theory device used in the basic definitions of computation and algorithm. The program you design is one designed to (attempt to) pass the turing test. Yours Truly, -- Comp. Sci. Nazi Association of America
Voight-Kampff was used to determine whether the subject was able to empathize with others. Interesting that the replicants were the ones who actually exhibited the quality (Leon and Rachael keeping photos of their "families", Batty breaking Deckard's fingers for killing Pris, even Deckard lying to Rachael that he was only joking about her being a replicant) while the humans in the movie seemed to lack it. Then again, I guess that was the whole point.
I don't care why you're posting AC
I love the modern hindsight we now have no this retro-futuristic point of view. Modern AIs have shown that emotions are a lot easier to implement than intelligence. We have computer pets now, exactly because we have managed to simulate emotions, but not intelligence.
You made grammar errors in your grammar correction.
It is fairly trivial even now to develop machines with no or minimal programming that can display emergent behaviors as complex as you are describing.
Which is largely beside the point, your baby, at the stage of development you describe is not displaying "intelligence" or even (and I use the term specifically in the Philosophical sense of an entity that displays complex moral reasoning) a person. Humans infants of the newborn to several months stage of development are not even close to displaying personhood. In general, humans show the first signs, which include complex (and by "complex" I mean anything more than just simple imitation and repetition) speech, ability to recognize the self in a mirror, etc at around 2 years.
I'm not saying these things just to ruffle your feathers, but to make a point. If you were to take a newborn infant, provide it with the bare minimum to keep it alive, but not provide it with sufficient nurturing and social stimulation for a decade, the result wouldn't be a person either. It would be a criminally insane animal.
What I am suggesting is that doing the same thing with a purported AI would probably have the same effect. Even if it managed to develop "true" intelligence, which I very much doubt, how could we expect it to be anything other than dangerously insane from our perspective? How is it going to develop the ability to engage in moral reasoning about the rights of other intelligent entities without direct, and extensive interaction with them? Human Beings can't do that, why should we expect AIs to?
In my opinion it is absolutely necessary that an AI develop complex moral reasoning. Hopefully better than much of human history indicates the average human has.
That depends on what your goal is. If your goal is to reproduce the process of human mental development, from a child to an adult, in silico, then I agree. However, if your goal is merely to produce an intelligence that can think at least as well as a human can, then you can take shortcuts -- such as supplying the intelligence with a ready-made database of knowledge, or a built-in library of common tasks ("I know Kung Fu"), etc. As long as the intelligence is as capable of learning and evolving as an average human, I see no harm in starting it off with something it can use.
Or, put it this way: adult humans take 18 years or so to mature; that's a pretty long development cycle. If you're building an AI, you might as well accelerate it as much as you can.
>|<*:=
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.
I have no idea why the original poster was modded troll, but this dipshit AC is considered funny. Search your hearts on that one, /. mods...
The original poster raised a good point... passing a Turing test is not the same thing as creating intelligence, artificial or not. But many members of the slashdot community seemed to think so, because the story was tagged "singularity" - a term which, when applied to the field of intelligence research, is used to refer to the creation of an intellect greater than that of humanity.
Passing a Turing test is probably merely a step towards a true AI - and possibly a rather small step. It is not necessarily an AI.
You're reaching levels of fallacy reserved for religious fanatics and René Descartes*. The phrase "on her/their own" is extremely misleading, as it presumes a lot about the identity of the systems in question. (If you still wish to argue this point then I strongly recommend clarifying what you mean by this phrase.) You have no business equating life support to power and cooling without allowing the same analogy between the instincts built into the nervous system and the initial boot code executed by a CPU.
* "Meditations on First Philosophy" sucks and I want the whole world to know it!
Evidently, the key to understanding recursion is to begin by understanding recursion. The rest is easy.
I disagree. Any sufficiently simulated intelligence will be indistinguishable from true intelligence. Therefore if it can pass the turing test (passing means its impossible to determine if you're speaking with a machine or human, correct?), how can we determine if its true intelligence or simulated intelligence?