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Loebner Talks AI
Mighty Squirrel writes "This is a fascinating interivew with Hugh Loebner, the academic who has arguably done more to promote the development of artifical intelligence than anyone else. He founded the Loebner prize in 1990 to promote the development of artificial intelligence by asking developers to create a machine which passes the Turing Test — meaning it responds in a way indistinguishable from a human. The latest running of the contest is this weekend and this article shows what an interesting and colourful character Loebner is."
This being Slashdot and all, the bastion of atheist nerds, I would argue that your comment was modded up primarily because of that last sentence. The fact remains that the Turing test is a stupid test. Passing the test would prove absolutely nothing other than that a programmer can be clever enough to fool some dumb judges. Computer programs routinely fool people into believing they're human. Some of the bots on usenet do it all the time. Big deal.
Like I said, intelligence is about pattern recognition, operant and classical conditioning, anticipation, goal-directed and adaptive behavior. Over the last centrury, psychologists have perfected excellent procedures to test for those things. Use those tests instead. Anything else is spinning your wheels; or just another way of worshiping Alan Turing, a man who really contributed nothing interesting or useful to the field of AI that anybody can point to.
The truth is that Turing is a false god. Even the so-called Turing machine is completely useless as far as helping with the really nasty problems (e.g., the parallel programming and software reliability crises) that the computer industry is currently struggling with. In fact, I would maintain that it is the academic community's enfatuation with the Turing machine that got us into this sorry mess in the first place. I think it is time for the Turing madness to end. I always tell it like I see it.