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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."
He is the genius who brought the UK the BBC Micro, and is now studying the relationship between AI and biological neurons. His comments on the BBC website make very interesting reading regarding the problems facing AI and computer intelligence.
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)
Hardly a fascinating interview, more like 4 paragraphs and a soundbite or two, if you haven't read TFA, don't bother.
Well that's really the point of the test. Any "AI" that simply manipulates text as symbols is going to fail the turing test. To make one that can pass the test, imho, would probably require years of training it to speak, like one would with a child. It also requires solving all the associated problems of reference - how can a deaf, blind and anesthesic child truly get a sense of what something is, so much so that they can talk about it(or type about it, assuming they have some kind of direct computer hook up which allows them to read and write text).
:)
Basically, nothing's going to pass the turing test until we have actual AI. Which is the whole point of the test!
I study AI at Reading by the way so I'll be going along to the event tomorrow morning
Wait...who made psychologists the masters of the term "intelligence" and all derivations thereof?
No, frankly, they can't have that term. And you can't decide what is interesting and is uninteresting.
If I revealed to you right now that I'm a machine writing this response, that would not interest you at all? I'm not a machine. But the point of the Turing test is that I could, in fact, be any Turing-test beating machine rather than a human. Sure, it's a damn Chinese room. But it's still good for talking to.
Whether or not your dog has intelligence has nothing to do with this, because AI is not robot dog manufacturing.
The Loebner Prize is a farce. Read all about it: http://dir.salon.com/story/tech/feature/2003/02/26/loebner_part_one/index.html