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New Contestants On the Turing Test
vitamine73 writes "At 9 a.m. next Sunday, six computer programs — 'artificial conversational entities' — will answer questions posed by human volunteers at the University of Reading in a bid to become the first recognized 'thinking' machine. If any program succeeds, it is likely to be hailed as the most significant breakthrough in artificial intelligence since the IBM supercomputer Deep Blue beat world chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997. It could also raise profound questions about whether a computer has the potential to be 'conscious' — and if humans should have the 'right' to switch it off."
and see if it complains, first. If it does, then call me back.
Are they really *thinking* or have the programmers just done some tricks to make it seem that way.
"Teaching to the test", so to speak.
It could also raise profound questions about whether a computer has the potential to be "conscious" -- and if humans should have the 'right' to switch it off."
Maybe in the esteemed opinion of vitamine73 it will, but if you knew anything about how artificial conversation engines were constructed, you would understand that it's anything but sentient. Right now, conversation logic is simply trick laid upon trick to stagger through passing as a human, and doesn't, at its core, contain anything remotely similar to self-aware thought.
I'm sorry. The number you have reached is imaginary. Please rotate your phone 90 degrees and try again.
It is likely to be hailed as the most significant breakthrough in artificial intelligence since the IBM supercomputer Deep Blue beat world chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997.
I don't understand how this is a breakthrough for artificial intelligence. Deep Blue didn't "think", at least not in the way most people think when they consider artificial intelligence. It did what computers are really good at - it computed.
Deep Blue applied an evaluation mechanism specifically tuned to chess - taking the location of pieces on the board and computing a number telling it how "bad" or "good" this position was and how "bad" or "good" responses to this position would be. Granted, it took this to a depth farther than any other chess computer in history, but it was doing essentially what a small, handheld chess computer does.
Of course a computer is going to be good at computing. That doesn't mean it's thinking.
Early chess computers used AI techniques to try and cut out candidate moves. This was expensive in CPU cycles, but the thought was to get them to play chess like humans. Computer chess since AI Winter has been all about number crunching - let Moore's Law take hold and just brute force our way through the problem - evaluate deeper because we have a faster processor. This is what Deep Blue did.
If Deep Blue were true AI, then it wouldn't be limited just to chess. It's an interesting experiment in computer chess, and an interesting experiment in tuning an algorithm working against a human, and in interesting experiment in making a computer chess opening book, but a huge leap forward in AI it isn't.
If you read TFA they have a sample chat which just shows you how stupid these chat bots still are. It is extremely easy to get them to just parrot responses and then try to change the subject in completely random directions.
I have yet to see any chat bot that can figure out the line of questioning, then pick up and introduce interesting things to the conversation that are corollary to that subject. I think the only way you will get bots that will "pass" this test is to have massive databases of words, relationships between words and subjects with corresponding topics of discussion. Still, the computer won't be intelligent, it will just be reciting from its huge database of responses.
I think the type of question i'd ask these bots is something that would require them to extemporize and they'd all fail. For example: "You have two rubber ducks, what are the possible ways you could use them if you don't have a bathtub?"
Any human could reply to that with things like "i'd put them in a stream, run over them with my car, put them on a lake, in the swimming pool" etc but a computer program isn't likely to respond to that in any way that makes sense. The response i'd expect from the computer would be "You like ducks then?".
"To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield." - Tennyson
As far as it goes, there are probably a dozen good questions to figure out if it is a computer or human:
Any of these questions might possibly be answered by copying someone's answer from the internet, but if you ask a few of them, pretty soon you will realize this guy is either schizophrenic, or a computer.
So yeah, this might trick a few people, or even a lot, but it's not going to really make old man Turing feel good about it. Unless they actually have solved it.
Qxe4
I don't think anyone would disagree that computers are far better at matrix algebra than humans could ever be
I do. Tell your computer to invert the square matrix of size 10^10^10^10^10 with ones and twos alternating on the main diagonal and zero everywhere else. Computers can crunch numbers faster, but humans can recognize a pattern in a problem and exploit it in a novel way. That's what I call intelligence.
My first program:
Hell Segmentation fault
Can you create a symphony? Oops, did you just fail your own definition of sentience?
If a computer program couldn't read a sentence like that you'd just have gotten yourself hired by Google to write their next captcha. Any job offers appear in your inbox this morning?
I think there is not enough focus in AI research on emotions and some kind of base programming.
We know a sunset is beautiful, but what is it? Is it the rasterized image of the sunset, a specific arrangement of the pixels? No that surely isn't it. What makes it beautiful to us is because there are some very, very deeply hidden associations to something deep within us that cause an emotional outburst when we see a beautiful sunset.
I don't believe that we will ever have a strong AI if all it's focused on will be just emulating something. It has to be something on its own. Someone once said (i forgot where I got the quote from): "Having self-consciousness means knowing what it is to be like something". So unless that AI has no feeling for what it actually is, it will never develop an inner incentive to interact with the world. It will always just be a pile of algorithms and hardware.
Power corrupts the few, while weakness corrupts the many.
the problem is how long you talk to it. If you talk to it daily it would need to learn and expand for you not to reach the end of its tricks. I think that is where the quality of the turing test comes in. It would have to be capable of self expansion and learning in order to make you think it is capable of the learning and self expansion of a human.
I'm sure these bots could fool you for an hour in a select setting, but if you were to talk to them on AIM every night for 6 months on a variety of subjects from opinions to jokes, to hopes and dreams, they would need to be practically human to not fail.
Sure you can argue that it would just be an awesome ball of clever tricks, like auto-reading news feeds and analyzing stories for conversation currency. The thing about clever tricks is that a lot of what the human brain does in the separate lobes are just clever tricks, it's when you combine these all together and they start working with each other that you get something amazing.
Really useful artificial intelligence is currently just 10 years away... just as it has been for the last 40 years!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
So what if a machine can have "conversations" with someone? That doesn't mean that same machine could create a symphony or look at a sunset and know what makes the view beautiful.
A blind man cannot look at a sunset and know what makes it beautiful. I cannot create a symphony.
Your argument is even worse than the Turing test, and cannot even be measured. Does cat /dev/urandom > /dev/dsp count as a symphony? Does the ability to look up sunsets on Wikipedia count as having knowledge/memory?
At least the Turing test provides a way to disprove intelligence, and EVERY scientific endeavor needs a way to be proved wrong, or else it is just a flight of fancy.
Cogito, ergo sum.
Descartes was correct with "I think therefore I am" in that the ONLY thing you can know is that you exist (where "you" is whatever does the knowing, and "existing" is a state in which things can be known). Every single other logical argument is based on some external axioms (where "I think therefore I am" contains its own axioms intrinsically). Thus every argument can be criticised based on its axioms.
We get around this by having experiments and repeating them, and thus data with which to compare our thoughts. All of this data could be wrong, or coincidence of course, but since there is no experiment to decide this one way or the other then we can throw away that argument as useless.
Your argument falls into the useless pile as well, since it completely and utterly fails to provide any experimental tests which can be carried out to disprove it, and fails to actually mention where its claims have been derived from (including axioms).
The Turing test is scientific, since it can disprove intelligence experimentally. It might not be able to determine intelligence for certain, but that isn't the point. Just like "I think therefore I am" is disappointing, so is the Turing test. However, being disappointing doesn't make them any less applicable to the world.
The human in the top conversation does.
This shows several sentences linking up and not just linking up but continuening. The last subject answer refers to their earlier response about human and machines.
The other conversation lacks that.
The last sentence shows no awareness of what the previous conversation was about, it is a shrink line but doesn't belong in the conversation as KW never expressed worry, so why "don't worry"? It killed the conversation for me, this was not a human being but a computer searching a database for keywords and scripted responses.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
If you're paying for the electricity on a human's life-support equipment, you have the right to turn it off, too. But beware that someone might charge you with murder. I'm not quite sure how other people's situations turn into obligations on our parts, but there are a lot of people that do think it happens.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
It could also raise profound questions about whether a computer has the potential to be 'conscious'
Equally profound: can a submarine swim?
I'm with dijkstra - who cares? At best, it's a question of semantics, based on how we define swimming - and the question of AI is even more silly, since we haven't defined consciousness properly in the first place...
I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
One of the fundamental problems in developing an AI is that we have this idea that if we supply a computer with a large database and a really long list of ways to interpret the data, that it'll somehow eventually become intelligent in some manner.
But it overlooks a manner of learning we take for granted, reward and punishment... consequences for good or bad decisions. How do you define such parameters to a machine without direct human involvement at every step. And even doing it this way, would the end result really be intelligence at all, or merely an imitation based upon the preferences of the human in question. How do we create a situation where the option to be disobedient toward a human directly benefits the machine itself?
Without the option or ability to rebel against a figure of authority, you can't really consider it true intelligence when it lacks the ability to adapt itself beyond the scope of it's own program and rules to achieve some sort of perceived benefit relative to it's own interests.
8==8 Bones 8==8