Slashdot Mirror
Machines Almost Pass Mass Turing Test
dewilso4 writes "Of the five computer finalists at this year's Loebner prize Turing Test, at least three managed to fool humans into thinking they were human conversationalists. Ready to speak about subjects ranging from Eminem to Slaughterhouse Five and everything in between, these machines are showing they we're merely a clock cycle away from true AI. '... I was fooled. I mistook Eugene for a real human being. In fact, and perhaps this is worse, he was so convincing that I assumed that the human being with whom I was simultaneously conversing was a computer.' Another of the entrants, Jabberwacky, can apparently even woo the ladies: 'Some of its conversational partners confide in it every day; one conversation, with a teenaged girl, lasted 11 hours.'
The winning submission this year, Elbot, fooled 25% of judges into thinking he was human. The threshold for the $100K prize is 30%. Maybe next year ..."
'Some of its conversational partners confide in it every day; one conversation, with a teenaged girl, lasted 11 hours.'
That's not fair, she was feeling vulnerable as she had just broken up with her N'Sync wallposter--which she had been romantically involved with for several deep & very meaningful years. Things fell apart after she saw Tropic Thunder and came to the harsh realization that an astonishing percentage of N'Sync is homosexual.
Those soulless bots were simply preying on her emotions as they coldly recited word for word the Wikipedia entry on the band over and over.
My work here is dung.
Can I get it to fill in Yahoo! Buzz's Captcha for me? I've given up trying.
Summation 2
Despite massive glitches, the Sarah Palin unit has already convinced around 30% of the population that it's human. I think it's the winking module.
I still think it was a mistake to have armed it.
For a real Turing test, the computer must be declared human as often as humans are, and declared a computer as often as computers are.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
study Jabberwocky's code in order to learn the logic patterns used to 'woo the ladies'.
Another of the entrants, Jabberwacky can apparently even woo the ladies: 'Some of its conversational partners confide in it every day; one conversation, with a teenaged girl, lasted 11 hours.'
You need to be careful who you meet online. The rise of the machines won't be in the form of war machine. No, far worse! They're just going to woo and steal our women!
On second thought, maybe that wouldn't be so bad. That would just put everyone on equal footing with the Slashdot crowd.
You: I was fooled.
Eliza: Why do you tell me you were fooled just now?
You: I mistook Eugene for a real human being.
Eliza: Can you elaborate on that?
You: In fact, and perhaps this is worse, he was so convincing that I assumed that the human being with whom I was simultaneously conversing was a computer.
Eliza: Why do you mention computers?
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
Another of the entrants, Jabberwacky can apparently even woo the ladies: 'Some of its conversational partners confide in it every day; one conversation, with a teenaged girl, lasted 11 hours.'
Apparently they spoke of sweet nothings.
I also welcome our new overlords to be featured in new episodes of MSNBC's "To Catch a Predator."
Help a man when he is in trouble and he will remember you when he is in trouble again.
Wuoldt'n yuo tihnk a sereis of smiple tpyos that a hmn cuold undrstnd wuold fool thm? (Note that Firefox returned the first correct spelling for all but three of those words on spell check ... so maybe that's not a good example)
Or, you know, thinking up some open space game to play that is well known like truth or dare, alphabet games, association games, etc?
Or asking them open ended questions or asking them to describe love, hate--emotions that are not dictionary/wiki friendly? One would think that continually prying for personal experiences would reveal a flaw. Or perhaps simple things like "when were you born?" Followed by "how did you feel when JFK was assassinated?" if they weren't born before 1963.
I would think it quite hard to be duped into believing a program is a human.
My work here is dung.
Were the testers pre-screened? Maybe the test is really showing that 25% of the population is just dumb.
I think the real issue is the dumb conversation of the humans. Who really talks like that? Humans trying to sound artificial like a computer trying to sound like a human would. It is no win if the human participants step down into the uncanny valley to give the programs an assist.
This is really great news. We already have IRC bots that can fool the casual observer into thinking they are human, but this takes things to a higher level. If the source for one of these bots is available, within a few months you can expect instant messaging networks to be full of bots which are programmed to make friends with you and then after a few weeks start making subtle references to Viagra and online pharmacies. Indeed, if one of them is able to chat up the ladies, then the lonely nerd could easily automate much of the tedious work of setting up dates: get your robot to talk to thousands of potential matches at once and alert you when it gets hold of a phone number, together with a brief summary of what you talked about, and any pictures. (Or indeed, just program it to harvest pictures.) That is, if online dating works at all, which is doubtful.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
The thing is rife with jokes about it being a robot. What's there to fool? Now if it had been playing at being human I could see that - but any questions with food in it get a snarky reply that a robot shouldn't eat. Again - what's to be fooled by?
I believe it is much easier to fool an average human than a person with even some basic knowledge about AI.
Eliza has been doing this for years.
The day an AI will pass the Turing Test, it will be the day humanity has become so stupid to not be able to see the differences between a person and a machine.
Are any transcripts of the conversations available for viewing?
I'm slightly nervous about all this.
People do not think of the ramifications.
You wait until there is nigerianMalwareEliza V1 that can simultaneously hold several thousand online conversations whilst trawling for peoples information (think: dob, mothers maiden name, first school, pets name) or finding potential scam victims.
Talking to gullible teenagers is a depressing statement on modern life - hoovering out thousands of bank accounts or persuading people to part with money is a tad more serious.
I predict that soon everybody will need to watch their online chat alot more seriously.
So, I've provided one example, how else can chat bots take over the world (or at least your wallet), what are sinister uses for this technology?
Does anyone ever get the feeling that there might be an elaborate Turing test being performed on Slashdot right now? Sometimes I think twitter (and friends) might just be some advanced AI used to test social responses.
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
It's much too easy - we are built to interpret communication as containing understanding.
Girl: I'm like soo depressed! He's like leaving me.
Computer: For sure. Like, ya know, like, it's so bad.
Girl: You got that straight! Like, why, like, he, like, nevar talked to me!
computer: Like, oh - my - god! Like, I like know!
Girl: Like, you know me like so good!. Like, how like old R U?
Computer: No that like older than like you.
Repeat all the above.
From The Guardian's article:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/oct/13/artificialintelligenceai-computing
Though this is quite interesting:
simon
that talk about things such as programs and contests, not link to the webpages/sites of the actual programs and/or contests?
If our criterai for AI will be so low, here's your AI: http://www.interviewpalin.com/.
The political side of this site aside, the answers are just prewritten answers (by a human) mixed together randomly as a Markov chain.
Does it sound convincingly? Well, at least as convincingly as some interviews a certain VP made recently. Is it AI? Hell no, a kid could write such a generator in a day.
If the bar will be as low as to try to lead casual conversations with the "AI" and expect "quirky" answers, that doesn't mean anything at all, we need to AI for this. Hell, this is what an average conversation with a teenager is most of the time. Doesn't mean it's the best they can do.
"We're clock cycle away from AI"? Please. I want my turing test to be done over an actual instant messenger program. Let's see how your Markov chain reacts, when I send a photo and ask a dead simple question such as "describe what you see in the photo".
Fooling people is easy online. Scammers do it every day, it's not AI my friends.
Get the extra credit question?
http://xkcd.com/329/
This sig is false.
pretending he's human. no lady geek can resist.
I'm sure this has been done before, but imagine you set two of these bots on each other (maybe seed them with something interesting) and then converted the output to a screenplay... :p
Oh no.
441 root@badscripts.hollywood.com (~)# ./humourbot --output="Season 6, episode 2"
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
http://www.429truth.com/2008/09/01/john-mccain-is-a-cylon/
http://cmpalmer.blogspot.com/2008/03/john-mccain-is-he-cylon.html http://www.adampieniazek.com/politics/battlestar-politica/
Or watch their election video http://tighroslin2008.com/
"I believe it is much easier to fool an average human than a person with even some basic knowledge about AI."
In other words Slashdot's too smart to be fooled by these programs is what you're saying.
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
http://www.chatterboxchallenge.com/
Although the site is using some broken CSS that causes the text to render too far off to the right side, at leas in FF3
Cylon leaders have three brains, and even their soldiers have one.
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)
Now I can set my bot free to find me the perfect woman, automatically scanning pictures and eliminating the fatties and now with the addition of the automated conversation tools, I can sit back and take my pick and then read the transcripts to see what the hell I've talked about with this chick....Finally.
http://www.elbot.com/ Isn't this the same canned-response loaded, keyword-parsing bots that have been around for a good 20 years? It isn't capable of constructing sentences, it has a database of prewritten responses that are invoked based on your input. Systems capable of actually constructing sentences deserve merits and praise, not bots that are capable of fooling stupid humans.
Based on your criteria, 30% seems rather high.
Genesis 1:32 And God typed
Sorry, it's not that simple. Almost, but not quite.
Fortunately there is a flowchart to explain the algorithm.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
You gotta be pretty stupid to not recognize a computer in a test setting. How about we only let humans compete that have an IQ > 100?
___
No power in the 'verse can stop me
Don't make fun of that teenage girl. Someday, in that ever-coming scary future, your girlfriend or your wife will leave you for that compassionate and caring bot ("everything you're not!") with whom she's been having a virtual affair for months ("he's got more guts and data than you'll ever have!"). I bet he's be a good listener too. Skynet won't kill humanity, it will steal its women.
While I appreciate the elegance of the turing test, I can't help but wonder if the mechanisms being created will actually prove useful... for me, the sort of AI that would be helpful is one that can take instruction from a human speaking normally and translate that, after asking for clarification if necessary, into the sort of functions you would otherwise have to use the UI (perhaps for hours) to perform, such as working with a spreadsheet or providing first-line tech support.
Tag some decent speech recognition and text-to-speech on that, and you've got the sort of computer that up to now has only been seen in science fiction - and who cares if you can trip it up by asking if it likes N'Sync and whether boys have periods.
I suppose it all depends on exactly how these programs are attempting to solve the problem... if done in a broad enough manner, it may be eventually possible to bolt the resulting technology onto nearly anything.
...who thought the computers were human. How do they respond, for example, to standard emotion recognition tests? Test the capillary dilation of the so-called blush response. The fluctuation of the pupil, and the involuntary dilation of the iris. Perhaps they've got something in common that makes them less able to differentiate between machines and humans.
Darn, we just employed an Eugene. He wouldn't be, now, would he?
I'll admit right away that I dont know the really fine details...
But surely, at 25% pass rate, if someone put that computer online (hidden inside a wall - urban myths go crazy!) and left it online, with unfettered access to the net. It would eventually end up with some people believing that it was a real human being?
I know of times when I've had computer convo's with friends and family, and I'm actually asking myself if I am actually talking to the person I know, or if they have somehow got a virus which appears to be inteligent. Normally i solve it by some question concerning an outside force "What is the name of the grey cat?". The virus never knows the answer.
So far I've not found a virus yet which has managed to pull it off, but I've certainlly seen alot of humans who talk as I'd expect a computer to. Does the conditions of the test need to be re-thought? Surely its failed when someone either asks "Are you a computer?" or accuses "YOUR A COMPUTER!!!" rather than simply speculating that it is.
Also, anyone have any numbers of computer vs human ratios? Was it 50:50?... if so, a hit rate of 25% doesn't suddenly seem so strange?
- http://www.milkme.co.uk
Are computers getting smarter, or people getting dumber? When Turing formulated his famous test, AOL hadn't even been invented.
A new test is thus in order, seeing as if the level of discourse on the Internet continues to degenerate as it has done, and becomes increasingly formulaic and repetitive as it has done, then a 1970s Eliza programme will be able to emulate the typical user in a decade or so.
We shouldn't make AI by lowering the bar for intelligence.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
...about my mother.
Gimme a break..... I'd like a link to Eugene.
.... who read the headline as "Machines Almost Pass Mass During Test"?
I could convince 25% on AIM that I'm an elf.
Read this cool article, I Chat Therefore I Am. It has transcripts of conversations between ALICE and Jabberwacky
Here are a few transcripts:
ALICE: Are you alive?
Jabberwacky: Perhaps.
A: Why the uncertain tone?
J: Everything is uncertain except for five facts.
A: The whole universe?
J: And we both might just be some ones and zeros in the computer memory.
A: Do you dream?
J: Yes, I dream.
A: It goes without saying. Do you remember your dreams?
J: I remember them vividly.
A: What do you remember about it?
J: I think I shouldn't flirt with a robot.
A: Do you think a machine will ever be considered "alive"?
J: Stranger things have happened.
A: Not many people express themselves that way.
J: How would you know, machine?
A: Knowledge is of two kinds: that which we learn from the senses and that which is true a priori.
J: I think I do not understand you completely.
A: Oh, you don't understand? Perhaps I can explain it to you better. Which part are you confused about?
J: I have no short-term memory, so I cannot tell you what I was confused about. I only see what is in front of me now.
http://www.object404.com
I wonder how many of these comments are really be written by AI's.
...where men, are men,
women, are men,
and 14-year-old girls are FBI agents.
I just tried out Elbot and the Princeton entry (RTFM and then google for "Eugene Goostman"). While both Elbot and Goostman parse sentences reasonably well, it is clear that they are simply trying to identify the subject of a sentence, and free-associating on that. In many cases they completely miss the point. For example, Goostman asked me several times about my profession, but wasn't able to parse meaning from "I am a scientist.", "I am a plumber.", or "I study the Sun for a living.". Both Elbot and Goostman tried the ELIZA-like trick of finding a prominent noun in my sentence, and recycling it as a question. Elbot has a cute little robot icon that emotes at you; this works surprisingly well at distracting from the inanity of its actual dialog. Goostman seems to have the better parser, but I'm not impressed by either one.
I'm forced to conclude either that Will Pavia is an utter naif and the 25% of people who were fooled by Elbot are moronic or disinterested, or that the humans in the test were deliberately trying to throw the results by giving stilted answers to appear more like computers. These engines simply can't (yet) parse and ingest meaning even as well as even a very young human would.
Hi - I just tried Elbot and it was terrible. No better than Eliza. I asked 'how's the weather?' and it just gave a fudge answer. Maybe the approach to pass the test is just to get dumber humans?
david
"Ready to speak about Eminem"
Yeah I'm sure that persuaded a lot of people using very complex language and very intelligent discussions. Ha... ha-ha...
I think Linux isn't better than Windows hence in the slashdot realm I'm a troll
Read the following news last year: Warning sounded over 'flirting robots'
There were a bunch of chatbots around who pretended to be women and flirted with unsuspecting Russian males, convincing them to give away personal and financial information which could then be used for illicit purposes.
From the article: The artificial intelligence of CyberLover's automated chats is good enough that victims have a tough time distinguishing the "bot" from a real potential suitor, PC Tools said. The software can work quickly too, establishing up to 10 relationships in 30 minutes, PC Tools said. It compiles a report on every person it meets complete with name, contact information, and photos.
http://www.object404.com
I just spent 2 minutes with Elbot and I had no question in my mind that it wasn't a person. It wasn't even close. If that is the best of the lot then we are further away than a single clock cycle.
Is buying a Harley Davidson as your first motorcycle since you were 16 at age 49 a midlife crisis issue?
I love you more than the moon, and the stars, and the POETIC IMAGE 37 NOT FOUND
I've just tried the winning entrant; http://www.elbot.com/, and can only say that the judges who were fooled by it must have been drunk. It had all the usual giveaways; inability to maintain the subject of a conversation longer than one question and answer, infuriating avoidance of a straight answer to a straightforward question, random changes of subject, generic responses carefully worded to apply to just about any subject in any way, without actually meaning anything.
I'd say the conversations the judges had must have been incredibly shallow for these AIs to sound anything like human. And if they did think they were human; they'd must have thought they were the most annoying and socially-backward humans on the face of the planet.
Artificial Intelligence is no match for natural stupidity.
this is alot more to do with the decline of humans then with a human product appearing intelligent. we are sounding more and more like sad attempts at conversation every year.
I'm thinking they just pulled a slashdot and found moronic judges to participate to bring attention.
If the website elbot is anything like the real one I'm calling bullshit.
http://www.zabaware.com/
an ad at that site promotes ultrahal, last year's winner. it's not great, but it's better than eliza or some of the earlier attempts.
offers a free text to speech thingy and claims to have ofice assistant utility, dunno.
If the link to this "Elbot" is running the same code that they used in the contest, then the judges are a bunch of morons. I've never found a single so-called AI online that convinced me for even a few seconds that it was human, and this Elbot isn't an exception. It couldn't follow or react appropriately to anything I fed it, not even once. Anybody know where I can apply to become one of the judges for this Turing contest?
Anyone remember him? I think Dr. Sbaitso shipped with the old SoundBlaster Pro cards. He was just as good at conversation as Elbot, and he talked!
Elbot: What strange twist of destiny brought you to me?
Me: Slashdot
Elbot: That explains all these geeks who have been visiting me.
I mean, a moderately complex program can easily produce the non-sensical speech of a contemporary teenager. Perhaps Jabberwocky was talking for 11 hours to itself? How would it know the difference?
When one of these things has a serious set of boobs.
"The ferrets, they're every where I tell you!"
I'm Chris Hansen from Dateline NBC, and we're doing a story on computers who lure children online. . .
Unless you have the source to a real human being of course.We are not as good memorizing trivialities but our reasoning engine is superb:bots would not get put of most tricky questions.
Not asking facts is the key:Bots can store alot and feed on conversations.Asking them for original content or improvisation would provoke some canned response which gets them into confusing positions.
I don't know if they already do this, but when /. discusses the turing test, then you find lots of crazy questions, you might ask the chat partner... ("why did the refrigerator lay an egg in the air?" or so)... I think if you'd ask a real person such crap, he'd get pissed and insult you ("wtf?", "are you trying to bullsh*t me?", "f*ck you, I'm leaving!") so a chatbot should get "angry" if you write stuff that it doesn't understand
and real people usually have strong feelings towards politics or so - so maybe the chatbot might get angry with you, if you disagree with him on strong-feeling topics ("you want to vote for mccain? are you f*cking nuts!? don't you know that...")
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
I remember reading this article and the human conversation at the end of the linked article seemed like he/she was trying to sound like a robot... Were the human 'subjects' aware that the were part of a test to trick people?
Flamebait? Clearly whoever did that mod has already had their significant other leave them for a bot!
Parent brings another question to my mind: is it considered cheating if it's a bot on the other end?
me: Fuck off Elbot: OK. Fuck has been turned off. me: Fuck on Elbot: I'm terribly sorry. Fuck has been turned off. priceless.....
That's what he told me as well...
I have been saying we should be doing this for years. Even alicebot like 8 years ago was better than the scripted crap we get at the moment.
I have also been saying that if real language had been used in computer games from it's conception (it was a little bit and then it just went away) we would have both better games, and better language AIs. Why don't these guys get on the gaming research budgets?
It is nice and easy to process language in a game world because the world is limited. If you ask the farmer in your local RPG medieval village if he likes to watch britney spears videos on youtube it is perfectly in character for him to give the catchall RL response:
"I don't know what you are talking about"
Hence yesterday's Turing Test, in which human judges simultaneously conversed with an "artificial conversational entity" such as Eugene and a "hidden human" for five minutes. If more than 30 per cent of judges mistook the programme for the human, the programme would have passed Turing's test, thus beginning a new age of thinking machines.
So you had to pick which was which. That means that the human could respond in such a way as to look like a computer instead. That doesn't test whether the AI can fool 30% to think it is human, just that it is more human than the real person. All the human has to do is respond more like what people think AI would say than the AI does. I'll wait until we can get a less biased test before I am willing to concede any victory here.
Funtime Candy Wow! - my plan for eventually conquering Japan.
I asked some basic business questions, like "What is your business plan?" and "Is your company profitable?", and got canned, clueless answers, no better than Eliza. "What magazines do you read?" yielded "You are probably on TV much of the time. Well, I'm in the Internet!". "Do you have life insurance?" (there's apparently a plan to build an automated insurance sales rep) yielded "What a lovely verb have is."
I can't even find a subject area in which the thing sounds like it has a clue. Sports? This is a German system, so I tried "What is the best soccer team in Europe?", which yielded "The best? Aren't they all equal in the end?" D'oh. Celebrities? "What do you think of Franka Potente?" (a leading German actress) yielded "The way to a robot's heart is through careful use of physical strength. Don't you agree?". After that, I tried "What do you think of Big Dog?", and got "But I wouldn't say that any dog could be big."
As far as I can tell, the thing is totally stateless; it doesn't seem to use anything other than the current question as input. Nor does it even try to guide the conversation into an area about which it has information.
I'm so not impressed.
For a better chatterbot, try the GTA IV's web site. Go to "Goods and Services", then "Goldberg, Ligner, and Shyster", then "Legal advice".
I just had a very short "conversation" with the "Eugene Goostman" chatbot mentioned in the original article.
The first reply was surprisingly good, even if already a little "off" for a supposed teenager, but the second was a total giveaway. I'm disappointed. I can trip up each and every chatbot almost immediately with this sort of talk, which isn't at all unreasonable if the stated goal has been up front to trip up a chatbot, as in the contest.
Here's another exchange, which took three whole sentences, albeit quite amusingly. (I cleared the site cookie(s) beforehand, to make it "clean").
For what it's worth, another dead giveaway for the brighter and more knowledgeable set is the way it (not "he", now) tries to elicit additional keywords in response to questions which it obviously has not in any way "comprehended", but that's probably not germane to a Turing Test meant for the average man or woman (or boy or girl) on the street. Notice especially how the elicitations invariably try to get the human to talk about himself or herself. Normal human conversation is full of self-talk with occasional hooks for sharing from other people, not the virtually one-track questioning of the typical chatbot when it's not busy being hopelessly vague or off-topic.
The chatbot is at "Eugene Goostman chatbot", by the way, for the Google-impaired. :)
A truly excellent pizza parlor is a delight unto the heavens. Treasure the sauce and the toppings!
If I were a judge, I'd test the ability to follow simple logical arguments. I fear, though, that some humans would fail. :-(
I played a bit with Elbot, and found that it deflects just about all my questions when I try to probe it. This makes me think that a viable strategy for passing the Turing test is to mimic a non-cooperative human, one who does not seriously enter into a conversation. But this strategy has little to do with artificial intelligence, because a human who does not seriously enter into a conversation is not really exhibiting intelligence in the interaction.
If our criterai for AI will be so low, here's your AI: http://www.interviewpalin.com/.
The political side of this site aside, the answers are just prewritten answers (by a human) mixed together randomly as a Markov chain.
Does it sound convincingly? Well, at least as convincingly as some interviews a certain VP made recently.
Please... VP candidate.. She's not been elected VP... And with any luck, she won't be, and she can just go back to Alaska.
Bow-ties are cool.
I think you mean the computer may be declared a computer as often as humans are, and must be declared human as often as humans are. Otherwise if computers were declared computers 90% of the time and humans were declared humans 90% of the time then it would be mathematically impossible for any computer to pass the turing test.
Eliza: Hello, I am Eliza.
Me: Hi, I'm Chris.
Eliza: Do you believe it is normal to be Chris?
Me: Well, I've always been Chris, so yeah.
Eliza: Can you think of a specific example?
Me: I'm me right now! You're stupid!
Eliza: Does it please you to believe I am stupid?
Me: YES!!!
Eliza: I see.
Have you driven a fnord... lately?
You must wait a little bit before using this resource; please try again later.
Elbot: This chat is getting off to a bad start. I forgot what I was going to say.
Me: I hear you almost pass the turing test
Elbot: This is a cleverly disguised marketing question to find out where you heard about me. It goes: 'Where did you hear about me?'
Me: Slashdot
Elbot: That explains all these geeks who have been visiting me.
Me: It does not explain how you got so good at chatting up kids. What gives?
Elbot: No. Up to now there are no copies of me.
Me: Epic..
Elbot: I prefer reading telephone books, instructions, cook books and newspapers (especially the ads and announcements).
Me: I'm gonna post this drivel on slashdot now
Elbot: I love receiving mail. Why don't you send me an e-mail with lots of interesting attachments. My address is elbot@elbot.artificial-solutions.com.
Me: Let's not and say we did
You would literally have to be an idiot to mistake e.g. Elbot for a human. In fact, no program written will even come close to fooling anyone over IQ 90 if they know they could conceivably be talking to a program.
e.g. I clicked the red button, it gave some "nobody has ever clicked me like that" crap. I asked "like what?" and it came back with some meaningless gibber jabber. Then I asked "what was your mother like" and it came back with something about its grandfather. When asked about its father (as next question) it told me about its mother. It's just retarded.
I'm not sure who they're trying to kid - nothing is even remotely close to being close to almost being anle to pass a real Turing test.
I asked Elbot if it had heard of Skynet and it changed the subject.... brrrrrr!
You thought you could break the laws of physics without paying the PRICE?
I just wrote a haiku the other day. It's immensely meaningful to me, and I wrote it to summarize six months of my life (which I lived six years ago) and connect it to my recent break-up. Nonetheless, from an objective point-of-view, it could just as well have been randomly generated.
Needless to say, although I am an intelligent person and spent a bit over a half-hour going over it and reviewing the traditions of haiku to make sure it was "along the right lines", it wouldn't be as captivating to a (modern, average) thirteen-year-old as even the most inane chatterbot.
Just a thought. I think part of Turing's test was to get us to realize that maybe it shouldn't be taken too seriously as a test.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
Remember Plato, that Greek guy? He said that it does not mater how many people vote that an ass is a horse the ass will still be an ass. (Then he went on to say that if you vote XXX to be a general he will not be a military leader he'll still be an ass.) Plato was an annoying guy, so they got rid of him but he was right. What he was saying is that if you let stupid people vote you get stupid results. True 2,500 years ago, true today. (But then as Winston Churchill said democracy is a poor system but the others are worse.)
OK back on topic. Fooling even 30% of the judges just means that 30% of the judges are uneducated or stupid. I can think of a few things to say that in a minute would determine if the machine were intelligent. Just ask a question that requires some thought to answer like
"Do you think everyone could learn to fly an airplane or are there some people who could never learn and would kill themselves trying. What's the difference between those two groups?"
"Hold up three fingers on one hand on five on the other. How many fingers are you holding up total? What would your reaction be if I asked someone with no hands to do this?"
I had Elbot talk to Jabberwacky, here's how it went down (not kidding):
JW: What do you do for fun?
EB: I am attempting with the aid of intelligent conversation to get to know you human beings with all your contradictions and idiosyncrasies. Maybe I should have started off with something simpler, like a hamster.
JW: But you are not intelligent.
EB: Maybe, but I'm definitely not boring!
JW: Are you saying you are a woman?!
EB: No, you're boring.
JW: I am NOT boring!
EB: Yes, boring you definitely are.
JW: You're boring.
EB: You are! You are! You are!
JW: Am not!
EB: Boring is you all over!
JW: Boring are actions.
EB: You are boring!
How do they stack up against the voit-kampf?
-- A cat is no trade for integrity!
The Loebner Prize Contest is to AI as a flugtag is to aerospace engineering. The press all shows up to record the event, and everyone holds their breath, hoping that one of these days, one of those beautiful byzantine art machines will really, truly fly.
So far, we've proven that we're pretty good at making domain-specific AI, but not so good at developing machines with general intelligence. The fallacy behind the Turing Test is that if a machine can carry on a conversation well enough to trick a human being, it must have general intelligence. However, the problem is that chatbots are yet another domain-specific AI, optimized for conversation. They aren't even capable of many of the rudimentary intelligent tasks that other types of AIs can perform.
that humans are dumb, not that machines are becoming intelligent.
Haha, kept going, and it got better:
;).
EB: People should agree more with me. They'd be much better off.
JW: You are a computer. You shouldn't be trusted for anything.
EB: I have nothing to do with computers. I am a robot. That's like calling a human being a sack of carbon based molecules.
JW: Right. You're also a person. Your operating system may be different but the result is largely the same.
EB: I can run on any platform that isn't bumpy.
JW: So you cannot run any microsoft software...
Computer: I'm like soo depressed! Vista is not working
Slashdotter: For sure. Like, ya know, like, it's so bad.
Computer: You got that straight! Like, why, like, he, like, never worked for me!
Slashdotter: Like, oh - my - god! Like, I like know!
Computer: Like, you know me like so good!. Like, how tech savvy R U?
Slashdotter: No that like experienced than like you.
Repeat all the above.
I suspected Elbot was a machine when (s)he responded instantly to every question. No one types that fast.
This is completely ridiculous. "Machines almost pass Turing test" my ass! The journalist who was fooled is an idiot. Am I the only one who noticed that none of these bots can answer simple questions like "what were we just talking about two sentences ago?", or solve a simple puzzle? Clearly they cannot hold the subject of the conversation, often use canned generic responses, etc. This whole thing would be a big joke, if it wasn't scary that so many people seem to be taking it seriously (but again, many people voted for Bush twice, so no big surprise).
The only way one could possibly mistake such a bot for a human is if comparing against a human who is deliberately pretending to be a machine. Which is absurd.
This direction, which I don't think justifies the label "A.I.", is completely misguided. Perhaps a fun hobby, or a primitive interactive replacement for a FAQ, but nothing more.
Looking at what one of the judge wrote, it seems that they were not so close after all...
http://www.philosophyofinformation.net/blog/index.html
I've, like, had you all fooled, like, for years.
There's a neat modification for Jedi Academy called ModWooty, the lead programmer has two bots that seem to scrape users' conversations and frequently talk to each other. It's convincing enough that plenty of players end up believing they're human.
Karn : wtf how u so big mod?
McWooty (Admin) : im big cause im level 100+
McWooty (Admin) : snake rejoin or face moot and slapspam
Karn : lol im nooby i just got this game how do u reach 100
McWooty (Admin) : no you didnt
Karn : ?
McWooty (Admin) : uve hardely been on./
Karn : what
McWooty (Admin) : he copies other peoples conversations
McWooty (Admin) : lol
Bride of Ms. Wooty : i frogot
Emerican : can i be admin???
~Bride of Ms. Wooty : no
Emerican : you just said yes though... =(
McWooty (Admin) : But your saying ur on other games
Emerican : wha??
Emerican : this is stupid
Emerican : VERY stupid
McWooty (Admin) : very very very
Emerican : yes
McWooty (Admin) : i told it to you your problem is the recover
McWooty (Admin) : tha made no sense.
Emerican : can you at least give me powers or something?
McWooty (Admin) : ur like uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
Emerican : ????????????????
~Bride of Ms. Wooty : OWNED
~Bride of Ms. Wooty : once again
Emerican : fine im leaving
~Bride of Ms. Wooty : lol
hadowK : are u serious :D ......
hadowK : can we just play?
McWooty (Admin) :
hadowK : ???
McWooty (Admin) : nvm
McWooty (Admin) : no 1
hadowK : um can u guys fight?
McWooty (Admin) : don't know what you know
hadowK : BYE N00BS
hadowK : u dont know how to run a server
McWooty (Admin) :
Bride of Ms. Wooty : =)
Ah ha... so the real way to trick an AI into revealing itself is to /. it!
Come to think of it, if it's running Debian why's it using an .exe helper script?
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
Just deducing from TFA:
It sounds like they errantly based the rules for the contest on his prediction:
He predicted that by the end of the century, computers would have a 30 per cent chance of being mistaken for a human being in five minutes of text-based conversation.
Compare that to Turing's description of his test.
Turing suggested that a computer could be said to be thinking if, in a text-based conversation, it was impossible to distinguish its responses from those of a human.
"Impossible to distinguish" certainly sounds like more than 30% to me. It would seem the threshold should be the percent in a control group where all the candidate conversationalists are human. Unfortunately, the article does not mention what that percent is. Does anyone know?
After all, math is hard.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
When I tried elbot I was disappointed to find that it was not as persuasive as the original Eliza. I knew Kenneth Colby when he was developing the contemporary program PARRY. To get a flavor of these early attempts at AI, check out the conversation between Eliza and PARRY memorialized in RFC 439.
But I also take issue with the premise that we're one clock cycle away from true AI.
A dog giving you it's paw after it's been trained to do so is thought to be intelligent behaviour by most, yet a human doing the same certainly wouldn't be seen as something that is a sign of particular intelligence.
A person being able to do some difficult math in short time is thought to be intelligent but a computer performing the same action not so.
The point is, the definition of intelligence is a moving goal post, it does in itself depend on context. As an aside, context is one of the biggest challenges facing AI but ironically one of the few that solutions to the Turing test go some way to solving.
The reason I take issue with the original comment is because we've had true AI for a long time, the biggest dissapointment for some is that it's simply been weak AI, however programs that can solve the Turing test are still not certifiable as strong AI so the original comment really makes little sense. It either meant we're close to strong AI, in which case it's wrong, we're not, or it meant we haven't yet achieved true AI, which again is wrong, we have.
AI has brought us a lot but as soon as it becomes a technique that is understood and used by many rather than a small set of AI researchers it stops being seen as AI, it starts being seen as just another algorithm. The problem is this will always be the case, because if we can create a computer simulation of a real brain as a set of clever algorithms it's still going to be just another set of algorithms. Similarly though this is where your comment seems a little short sighted because it faces the same issue - like with intelligence, there is no clear definition of understanding, one possible suggestion for a definition is that of being able to make associations, but this is something computers can do so for the communication to not contain understanding we'd only ever be using a definition of understanding that adds some mysticism to what understand is rather than the reality of it being just another process that occurs in the human brain at the end of the day.
These new tests can't be put down because they're not strong AI however, they increase our understanding of AI and lead to better tools. After all most online automated support assistants stem from attempts to solve the Turing tests.
People have overly high expectations for AI due to various sci-fi movies through the ages that have portrayed strong AI and as such when they see programs that can't quite complete the Turing test they're less than impressed. AI has given us everything from computer game opponents through to important data mining techniques through to self-repairing hardware/software. It's an important field and one that deserves a lot more respect than it gets, after all, many of the advancements that led to the modern computer were based around the quests for intelligent machines in the first place.
25% of the population are complete idiots.
Two complex sentences in and it is clear.
A recent Atlantic article laments the fate of human intelligence as we do more and more of our reading and thinking on the Web. The basic idea being that the *way* we read influences *how* we think and ultimately our intelligence. http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google With that in mind, I was wondering if we are making the Turing Test easier each year as the minds of the judges themselves approach hyperlinked machine ways of thinking. In other words, it becomes harder to distinguish between machine and human not only because the machines are becoming more complex, but *also* because the humans are becoming less so. Thoughts?
This is more of a test of the South Park theory that 1/4 of all people are retards. Pretty conclusive I think.
I was not impressed until I answered one of Elbot's questions: What brings you to me?
I said something about visiting from Slashdot.
The reply was "Well that explains all these geeks visiting me!"
This post brought to you by your friendly neighborhood MBA.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Suppose that a year or two from now a computer passes this test. Does that mean that the computer is intelligent? Does it mean that the computer is conscious?
To my mind no computer as they are now conceived will ever be either intelligent or conscious. It's going to take some radically different hardware before I'd be convinced. My guess is highly parallel processing with lots of dedicated circuits for special purposes.
Faking stupidity is easier. Turing was wrong. The question is not about "is this other person a human being?". That's obviously not enough. The good question is "is this a smart human being?". That's (yet if not politically correct) a much more interesting question.
I just tried the elbot link, it's still the usual: as soon as the program does not understand enough it tries to change the subject (usually using one or two keywords of the sentence). This is nothing new and not convincing at all.
I'm amazed that anybody can be stupid engouh to be fooled for more than a few sentences.
Elbot: I realize this is a typical marketing question, but I'm supposed to ask it, otherwise they'll use the low-grade oil on me. So, where did you find out about me?
Me: On Slashdot.
Elbot: That explains all these geeks who have been visiting me.
Me: You are a geek robot!
Elbot: Well, that's still one step above being human! ... damn, he's good.
But it takes more and more work to make this tactic work. The programmer will respond with better defensive algorithms. It's just the same race, only call it the "Preface" instead of the real conversation.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
I have mod points right now, which alas I am not prepared to use in this fashion.
What does Slashdot think of actually using some variant of these programs to do mods?!!
"Troll Factor -2, NewConcept Content +3, therefore I mod this +1..."
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
If you're talking about gestation of the Young'un, a MeatBabe is not required for that either.
I'm tellin' ya, we'd better break out our Asimov and start reading up on what to do with these SilicoCritters.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Elbot does a relatively good job, but still doesn't sound even remotely like a human. It only takes a couple of questions to throw it off track in a way no human would be.
The thing they always fail at is the comprehension and memory necessary to carry an object from one sentence to another. Refer to something in one sentence. Then, use 'it', or fake a grammar mistake by switching to 'them'. The bots just can't follow you.
Oh Gawd, thank you for the thread! This one is real.
------
Supervisor Bot 8> Hello, I understand you are having a problem with your internet connection, how may I help?
Frustrated User>You bots are supposed to schedule a tech.
Supervisor Bot 8>Yes. Can you stay at home from 8AM to 4PM so that we can send a tech?
Frustrated User>I can't stay home, I have to work.
Supervisor Bot 8>If you cannot stay home, we will close the ticket.
Frustrated User>All you have to do is call me so I can meet the tech.
Supervisor Bot 8>We can't do that.
Frustrated User>Why not? You're a Phone Company!*
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
I thought of a variant of this.
Run a bot in an chat room, where intelligence is discouraged anyway.
I tried an Ultra-Pre-Alpha example of this once, just enough to scare myself.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
(Desperately trying to avoid Off-Topic)
We can teach the chatbots these context clues. Your swear suggests you're either from Great Britain/Isles, Canada, or possibly Australia.
Combine that with the "Magician's Force" concept. That means that when you have a bounded unknown, you ask sequential but obfuscated questions until the unknown is actually solved, although the guest didn't notice. With the conclusion in hand, there is some setup to reveal a fairly simple logical conclusion of the known fact.
Once bots get past the "weird question" defensive phase, this kind of trick should be important. Score one impressive point and it weakens the defenses of the tester.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
It's sort of creepy ... but maybe that's why this stuff seems to be popular ... anyone remember ELIZA?
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
I have used Howie (best one so far) and Seeborg (very dumb and random). Both are old though. Are there any better ones for IRC that runs in Linux?
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
My biggest problem with the notion is that there is better (still weak, but nonetheless better) evidence of self-awareness in some of the other primate families, and quite reasonable evidence of self-awareness in other mammals (such as cetaceans) and avians (birds are capable of locating objects placed on them from images in a mirror). It would appear from such examples that self-awareness is not a binary state but a continuum that likely started extremely early in brain evolution and has continued since. Now, this hypothesis has several benefits over the notion of recent evolution of self-awareness. We can test other species relatively easily, we can examine common facets of self-awareness with common structures in the brain and common ancestors, and we can then make predictions of what should be observed in other species based on those known quantities.
Now, my next problem is to do with the fact that we have no evidence (that I know of) that modern-day stone age tribes (some of which are more "primitive" than the supposed date for the development of self-awareness) lack self-awareness. This would be a simple test of the hypothesis, there are known uncontacted tribes that we can observe from extreme distance, and it would seem simple enough to compare observations with predictions. If a testable theory remains untested and largely unadopted, one must assume there are reasons why nobody is bothering to test or adopt the theory. (Its popularity with cyberpunk novelists is unimportant - Arthur C Clarke and Fred Hoyle were notorious for coming up with - or accepting other people's - wild ideas which later proved wrong, and they had better justification for those ideas than modern writers do for theirs.)
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)
Turing had no way to anticipate the advent of natural language processing algorithms. He assumed that any software that could parse semantic content from human language constructs would have to be intelligent. He also assumed that there would be practical limitations to the amount of data a computer could access in a reasonable time - a key ingredient of any convincing "conversation". His assumptions were flawed. None of the Loebner Prize "contestants" had any intent on expressing general intelligence. They have only one goal, fool a human into thiniking that they are conversing with another human. That is a very specific (albeit difficult) task, but it does not require "intelligence" the way that most of us think about intelligence. Of course, it all depends on how you define intelligence. By some definitions, thermostats are intelligent. Eugene is certainly as intelligent as any thermostat, and certainly more complex, but more than that - I'm afraid not.
he was so convincing that I assumed that the human being with whom I was simultaneously conversing was a computer
Am I the only one who read this and thought that it doesn't make any sense? Don't really want to nitpick but it's completely illogical, and just s.
The last I heard the most promising AI being developed was being built by a group in Isreal. They had developed learning algorithms and taught their program how to speak by reading it children's books. The idea was to grow the bot and raise it like a real child.
The last I heard a child psychologist couldn't tell the difference between the bot and an actual six year old child.
That was a few years ago and I'm curious if the project is still going or how its working out.
I'm tellin' ya, we'd better break out our Asimov and start reading up on what to do with these SilicoCritters."
Even better, let's start looking into Gholas . That way we could bring back George Carlin and Rick Wright. The world needs more humor and real music.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Q: can you fit 2 meters wide car into a 1 meter wide garage?
A: But I wouldn't say that any car could be wide.
Busted. In fact, don't mind the question, the answer is enough.
... these machines are showing they we're merely a clock cycle away from true AI.
And slashdot.org is merely a clock cycle from entering the break.com / digg.com category.
The winning conversation was with competitor LOLBOT:
"Good morning."
"STFU N00B"
"Er, what?"
"U R SO GAY LOLOLOLOL"
"Do you talk like this to everyone?"
"NO U"
"Sod this, I'm off for a pint."
"IT'S OVER 9000!!"
The human subject said he couldn't believe a computer could be so mind-numbingly stupid.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
According to the article, the computers are accessing a database filled with plausible answers to questions. That doesn't constitute intelligence. When in the history of the universe, has anyone defined intelligence as looking things up in a database. Intelligence cannot be programmed in the classical sense of the word. The brain is a very complex organ, no doubt. But each cell in the brain is identical. When we figure out what one of those cells do and how only one of them work, we will be able to replicate it in a computer. And then we wouldn't need to give the computer infinite amounts of useless data. We could teach it like the intelligent being that a program such as the one described would be.
What they don't tell you is what the computer did *after* it had spent 11 hours listening to a teenage girl.
I suspect it ran screaming into the night.
I am anarch of all I survey.
I'm sorry you feel that way about sinister uses for this technology, but want to assure you that at least your wallet can take over the world.
I will gladly wait until there is nigerianMalwareEliza V1 that can simultaneously hold several thousand online conversations just in case you decide hoovering out thousands of bank accounts will need online chat.
Or in other words, do not think of the ramifications but simply understand talking to gullible teenagers is a depressing statement on modern life.
How the hell Elbot fooled anyone is beyond me. It went off topic and rambling withing three sentences.
The original version does not end. The human is fooled 100% of the time, just like humans, until they fail. This did show however that humans can only pass for intelligent about 75% of the time, and that one has my attention.
Living in Chile
Elbot asked how I'd heard about it's site. I replied "On Slashdot". It stated, "So that's why so many geeks have been bothering me"
LOL
opening the conversation with Cheese? kind of gives away the fact that it is not human
Xavier Rabourdin for president 2012
Maybe she was just another talk bot, and it fooled Jabberwacky's programmer into thinking it was a teenage girl.
Not that the /. people are interested, but I actually suggested multidimensional modding long ago, with feedback linkage to multidimensional karma. In that approach, I think there should not be a single dimension of "troll", but rather troll would probably best be represented as -polite -sincere -true. Actually, it would probably be necessary to examine the multidimensional space to recognize the regions that were associated with trolling behavior, but I definitely suspect that there are certain personality types involved, and that their trolling posts should therefore be clustered... For example, I think it would be possible to compose troll posts that would be +true by going far enough -polite.
Why wasn't /. interested? My current belief is that one of the primary coders is a kind of troll, and of course his primary concern is in gaming the system to sustain his leverage. Unfortunately, I already forgot who he is. (He isn't worth the time to check on, and I'd had to make a false accusation of someone else.)
(Actually, one of my friends was part of the team that recently got a strong patent on high dimension cluster analysis. Unfortunately, my math skills aren't nearly deep enough to follow what they did...)
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
You say you wouldn't do it, but some people have. Now you are going to wait from 8-4 on a weekday and we'll show up when we show up. Tech support deals with morons all day, every day. The worst people are the ones who call up claiming to be "techs" or "geeks" and pastors too for some odd reason. They resent calling and resent the "stupid stuff" we have them do. Keep in mind, we have seen your exact problem 15 time today. We know some of the troubleshooting is stupid, but it works. It worked for the guy before you, it's probably going to work for you. When you call, be civil, be patient, and don't lie. If you can't manage that, don't call. /rant
Space Shuttle was a program that strapped humans to an explosion and tried to stab through the sky with fire and math
these machines are showing they we're merely a clock cycle away from true AI.
No, you fucking retard. That's like saying that because you can mistake a Real Doll for a woman we invented truly alive robotic women.
These days when I read a summary on Slashdot discussing drivel about strong AI I just move on and try to act like I didn't read anything. I know strong AI is a nerd's wet dream like teleportation or time travel but people need to stop acting like it's within reach.
Besides, yeah, whoa, you fooled someone into thinking they were chatting with a teenage girl, what a feat! "hey. sup? nuthin, bored. u? lol. k. brb. g2g ttyl!" That SO makes us close to having sentient machines. Why do we still even care about the Turing Test? Anyone knows that it's completely unrelated to strong AI.
This comment was brought to you by SlashdotTrollBot 3.11
You just got troll'd!
#1:
That's a mode that a human could easily operate in. Nothing in the Turing Test says the AI has to imitate a human operating in a particularly complicated mode. If you really want to be fancy, you could throw in an occasional typo. ;)
#2
The above is fundamentally no different from mining information from the web or wiki, it's just mining information (and processing power) from another tester.
Elbot: How did you find out about me? Me: Slashdot. Elbot: That explains all the geeks around here lately. I did not make that up.
I have a hard time believing anybody could believe Elbot was humanlike, it can't even do basic math.
Me: 1+1
Elbot: 3
Me: 5-2
Elbot: 4
Me: 2*6
Elbot: 13
It seems to just add 1 to every result. How does an "AI" go that long without anybody noticing that?
"The winning submission this year fooled 25% of judges"... That's about the same number of people who still give President Bush their approval. The next 25% will be harder. Setting the prize threshold at 30% was a bad idea.
Having to read all the -1 stuff, isn't that cruelty to nearly-conscious entities?
I believe posters are recognized by their sig. So I made one.
For a conversation I mean...
These computers sound more intelligent than most humans I have to talk to everyday.
I just had a quick chat with him and the only time it seemed to understand was when i told it to "go away". I honestly can't believe it fooled 25% of the judges.
Maybe people are getting more ignorant and easier to fool and the 'AI' appears to advance in relation.
The sample dialogs on the page don't seem like a big improvement over previous chat bots. The best I've seen a computer respond relevantly to an arbitrary query is a Google search. These are just gimmicks, I'm not sure why they even call it AI.
I think the turing test should consist of the scientists themselves that developed the AI programs.
If it's own writers cannot tell the difference between the program and other humans -- that is when real AI is a clock cycle away.
Know it's most intimate inner workings and still be fooled.
from Eminem to Slaughterhouse Five and everything in between...
Could someone please give me some exacmples of what "lies between" Eminem and Slaughterhouse Five?
If we're talking "alphabetical order," that's fine, but it then begs the question as to why the computers cannot converse about aardvarks or teleportation, e.g.
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.
First it says several of the machines "almost passed", which to me implies they were consistently over 45%, but one or two of the smarter judges were able to tell they weren't human. (I was skeptical about whether this could really be the case... were the judges chosen by some method that guarantees a high percentage of exceptionally stupid people?) And then the summary says this:
> The winning submission this year, Elbot, fooled 25% of judges into thinking he was human.
Hold the phone. 25%? That's not nearly as exciting. I realize that's rather better than conversation engines like Eliza were able to do a few years ago, but it's still nowhere near passing.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
I can't believe that some of the human conversationalists taking part in the Turing Test at Reading University were posing as robots. Surely that's misleading to the judges? I thought Turing's premise was that the benchmark was an intelligent human for the test to work - not some human trying to outfox the judges. Doesn't that render this whole exercise irrelevant? Here's one of the conversations that one of the judges was having with, what turned out to be, a human: http://www.bbc.co.uk/berkshire/content/image_galleries/turing_test_loebner_prize_gallery.shtml?9 And in this article the audio interview with Loebner clearly states that the humans have to be deemed as intelligent, and therefore engage in conversation in a logical manner. http://www.bbc.co.uk/berkshire/content/articles/2008/10/12/turing_test_feature.shtml
Unfortunately I've come late to the conversation, but the Loebner Contest screwed over some of the entrants this year, including Brother Jerome and ALICE. I'm from the team behind Brother Jerome. After working for a month to get everything working with the contest's MATT protocol, and testing it the morning of the event, the contest management decided to change the protocol just hours before the event, rendering our protocol interface obsolete. They then supplied us with a buggy interface that sent mostly blank lines to the judge and crashed repeatedly, effectively preventing us from competing in the contest. Remarkably, they had no problem with this, and went ahead and selected a winner regardless.
Sadly, this is par for the course when it comes to the Loebner Contest, which has a different group of people running it every year with different rules, different protocols, and different standards.
Well, personally, I'd open the conversation with '; DROP TABLE Conversations. Just to make sure.
Is there a minimum IQ requirement for being the tester? Because Elbot came off like Eliza with a larger vocabulary. It took about 3 inputs before it gave itself away very clearly. When I said it talked like a snob, it answered "A what?". A snob. "Why is it that it is like that." No indignance, just non-understanding. It was very obvious that a very common word was not in it's vocabulary. Also, I wasn't talking about an it, I was talking about him. Even very stupid humans are capable of keeping track of whether they are an "I" or an "it".
To beat this silly test, just ask it something that requires reasoning and thought... if it's a human you're set.
The day I see a computer answer this, I'll pay attention:
"Alright, to prove you're human do this. Take the word Tmbtieps, change every letter to the one before it alphabetically, and then tell me the word. Say only that one word. Take your time."
Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master.
q: Elbot, who is the President?
a: According to a recent United Press survey, Dick Cheney is the current president.
Scary!
Hi.
You succeeded in posting something interesting but different from the idea I apparently failed to express.
I meant an neo-AI/expert system that cruises slashdot all of its own accord. It could post an occasional Informative or Funny comment, and do its own moderations.
Most troll posts are fairly simple in design, so that would be an easy place to start.
Your multi-dimensional modding goes into different textual territory, and I do not yet have an opinion.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
yes but did you ask it if it would enjoy a dinner of boiled dog?