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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."
Intelligence is not an arbitrary point on a line, there are varying degrees.
The Turing test has nothing to do with AI, sorry. It's just a test for programs that can put text strings together in order to fool people into believing they're intelligent. My dog is highly intelligent and yet it would fail this test. The Turing test is an ancient relic of the symbolic age of AI research history. And, as we all should know by now, after half a century of hype, symbolic AI has proved to be an absolute failure.
BBC Basic always initialized variables on first use, so you're ok.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
and use the Voight-Kampff test instead.
Unless someone can figure out how to make a program want something.
;)
If you take the lower life forms into consideration, you can teach a dog to sit, lay down and roll over.. what do they want? Positive encouragement, a rub on the belly or even a treat.
But how do you teach a program to want something?
Word of caution though, don't make the mistake made in so many movies.. don't teach the program to want more information..
Check out this great book by Jeff Hawkins, creator of the Palm, called On Intelligence. His work is about understanding how the brain really works so that you can make truly intelligent machines. Fascinating stuff and firmly based in the facts of reality, which is refreshing to say the least.
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The purpose of the Turing test was to make a point: if an artificial intelligence is indistinguishable from a natural intelligence, then why should one be treated differently from the other? It's an argument against biological chauvinism.
What Loebner has done is promote a theatrical parody of this concept: have people chat with chatterbots or other people and try to tell the difference. By far the easiest way to score well in the Loebner prize contest is to fake it. Have a vast repertoire of canned lines and try to figure out when to use them. Maybe throw in some fancy sentence parsing, maybe some slightly fancier stuff. That'll get quick results, but it has fundamental limitations. For example, how would it handle anything requiring computer vision? Or spatial reasoning? Or learning about fields that it was not specifically designed for?
It sometimes seems that the hardest part of AI is the things that our nervous systems do automatically, like image recognition, controlling our limbs, and auditory processing. It's a pity the Loebner prize overlooks all that stuff in favor of a cheap flashy spectacle.
That's a little bit too much personal information there sport. You don't have to post to slashdot every thought that pops into your head you know.
It's either intelligence or it's not. The issue of varying degrees of intelligence should not concern AI developers at this time. They'll have to cross that bridge when they come to it. Right now they can't even see the bridge. I always found this intriguing: why would your average comp-sci specialist think he can recreate in code such a uniquely biological phenomenon as intelligence? Why not start with something simpler? Like, maybe, have one Vista PC fuck another to produce a new service pack?
I'm fascinated by AI and our attempts to understand the workings of the mind. But these days, whenever I think about it, I end up feeling that a much more fundamental problem would be to figure out how to make use of the human minds we've already got that are going to waste. Some two hundred minds are born every minute -- each one a piece of raw computing power that puts our best technology to shame. Yet we haven't really figured out how to teach many of them properly, or how to get the most benefit out of them for themselves and for society.
If we create Artificial Intelligence, what would we even do with it? We've hardly figured out how to use Natural Intelligence :/
I don't mean to imply some kind of dilemma, AI research should of course go on. I'm just more fascinated with the idea of getting all this hardware we already have put to good use. Seems there's very little advancement going on in that field. It would certainly end up applying to AI anyways, when that time comes.
Cheers.