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Is Your IM Buddy Really a Computer?
audiovideodisco writes "Every year the Loebner Prize goes to the chatbot (and the corresponding human companion) that fares best on a Turing test administered by a panel of judges. Discover talked to Kevin Warwick, the professor who runs the competition, to get pointers on how one would go about detecting a bot. While there are some general approaches you can use, nothing is foolproof — and asking about Sarah Palin can be downright deceptive. One judge concluded an interlocutor was a bot because it didn't recognize Palin's name ... but it turned out the chatter was a French librarian who'd simply never heard of her." The chat transcripts show how difficult picking bot from non-bot is getting.
If the reply back about Sarah Palin is "She's great and would be the best person to be our next president!" you are talking to a computer.
I'll be damn! I'd never thought there would be advantages to being a frenchman!
Be very, very careful what you put into that head, because you will never, ever get it out. - Cardinal Wolsey
I for one welcome our new chatbot overlords.
I'm totally not one of them, you can trust me.
Clearly a bot, he continuously posts the same repetitive drivel.
On the occasion I get messaged by a random stranger that seems half way legit I just give them a Turing Test made up on the spot. It's usually something lame like "Joe and Pete were on a bus, Pete has four nickles Joe has six pennies between the two of them what type of vehicle were they on?". I usually apologize for that in advanced. The machines fail every time, but the best one I saw called me weird for saying it, asked what I meant, then about two minutes later gave me the right answer telling me a person was checking logs. (I was spending the time in between screwing with the bot)
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Ben Goertzel, AGI researcher, wrote in his article that crowd of people constantly talking to a virtual parrot would help it to grow into a naturally speaking context-understanding AI.
Is it getting harder to tell the difference because the bots are getting smarter, or simply because the intellectual level of an average random chat session keeps plummeting?
I have a feeling that the first chatbot to pass the Turing test will mostly talk in shorthand, I already have trouble telling some forum posts from a poorly programmed robot.
It's somewhat philosophical, but I've often wondered why people really care about whether an interlocutor is a machine or not. I mean, when you go down the to local corner shop to buy some milk, you're not bothered if the person who serves you doesn't know who wrote Paradise Lost, or who won the game last night. Sure, you could ask them, but what does it matter if they don't know?
The role of context and intelligence is hardly ever given much consideration, but it seems hugely important.
"And the meaning of words; when they cease to function; when will it start worrying you?"
... aka Captain Cyborg, is a running joke in the UK for many, many years.
His name associated with this event makes me smirks in anticipation of The Register coverage..
I've been a bot for years.
Conservation of angular momentum makes the world go round.
Is it cheating if your IM bot is fed by another bot scanning Twitter for topical material?
Son, someday all this will belong to your ex-wife.
Forget trying to discover who is the bot. I like to pretend I am a bot pretending to be a human. I see how long I can convince someone I've escaped from Google and I'm hiding in the Microsoft Network, where Google cannot go. Then I ask them "But how does 'ur a fukin idiot' make you feel?"
UTF-8: There and Back Again
I've been a bot for years.
I used to chat with bots of Quake3Arena.
Its fun, you never know what they'll say before launching a rocket in your direction.
FreeBSD bounties
Matt Mahoney to Hutter show details 9:33 AM (7 hours ago) [google.com]
I have uploaded a mirror of Alexander Ratushnyak's new submission to the Hutter prize [hutter1.net] to http://cs.fit.edu/~mmahoney/compression/text.html#1323 [fit.edu] It is in the paq8hp12 section. Scroll down to the bottom of the list of versions just above the table. The submission is decomp8.zip which contains 2 files, decomp8.exe and archive8.bin, the decompressor and compressed file. There is no compressor. To decompress:
decomp8 archive8.bin enwik8
The direct link is http://cs.fit.edu/~mmahoney/compression/decomp8.zip [fit.edu] Decompression took about 2 hours on my computer and used a little over 924 MB memory. The total size of the 2 files is 15,986,677 which passes the 3% threshold improvement from his previous submission of 16,481,655 bytes on May 14, 2007.
The submission was Mar. 23. The 30 day comment period before awarding the prize ends Apr. 22, 2009.
That's exactly what a bot would say.
Reply to a few Craigslist "Casual Encounters" posts. Almost all are a bot of some sort. Some more clever than others. Best one I saw was able to respond to an initial response quite well... it obviously understood the context to some degree. Then they give you an IM screen name to "chat" with them. Again, very context aware... all got to the point where they "try" and hook up their webcam, it "doesn't work", so they get you to go to some free "webcam sharing" site where you have to verify your age with a credit card... only when you read the fine print, after your "trial period" you get nailed for all sorts of fees... almost daily fees.
Want to see one in action?
AIM: livewirex31
Yahoo IM: greenlovex3
MSN: livewirex23@live.com
This isn't one of the better ones I have found, but I can see how it can fool most desperate individuals.
Yeah but how many times did you not vote for someone because of their VP pick?
(s)He could be a logged-in bot, posting as anon?
I wonder how many Slashdotters are actually bots, and how you would find us out...
Oops, I mean--ack--
+++out of cheese error+++
+++please reinstall universe+++
+++redo from start+++
Find environmentally and socially responsible products on http://buy-right.net
couldn't pass and would try and turn it around on the judges. "I suspect... *dramatically removes sunglasses that he's been wearing indoors for no particular reason other than to remove them dramatically*... that you sir... are the one that is a machine"
On a tangential note the interlocutors I hate the most are the pre-programmed phone systems the telco sets up to "help" you. You know, the ones that say "I'm sorry, I didn't understand the question" when you tell them for the hundredth time "my DSL keeps randomly disconnecting."
At least they're ten times better than the outsourced-to-India tech support.
$ make available
It could also be that you're just talking to a fucking moron.
Yeah, there's a huge problem with the Turing Test, which is that you have to distinguish between a computer and a person drawn from the pool of humans intelligent and aware enough to have learned to speak and use a keyboard.
Unfortunately, as YouTube (and even /.) comments demonstrate, there is no lower limit to the intellectual capacity of a person who is still capable of speaking and using a keyboard.
Therefore, the Turing Test is not, properly speaking, about distinguishing between artificial and real intelligence because a significant portion of the human population will be below any finite threshold of "intelligence" as the term is ordinarily construed. Ergo, any bot that reaches even a minimal level of coherence will be indistinguishable from some humans.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
I've yet to find a single bot that has ever understood this demand:
Can you type this backwards, read it, and tell me the result, please? 'net sulp neetfif'
That's nothing - I've been sleeping with a bot for 22 years.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
long ago I worked at an ISP which offered UUCP accounts, and the mail failure message was very polite and apologetic, and sometimes people would email back to the uucp daemon thanking it for trying
only the other day my wife, on receiving a "sorry, I have been unable to send this email for X days" from the exim (MTA) daemon replied to it telling it not to bother any more!
FX: facepalm!
Artificial intelligence came a step closer this weekend when a computer came within five percent of passing the Turing Test, which the computer passes if people cannot tell between the computer and a human.
The winning conversation was with competitor LOLBOT:
The human tester said he couldn't believe a computer could be so mind-numbingly stupid.
LOLBOT has since been released into the wild to post random abuse, hentai manga and titty shots to 4chan, after having been banned from YouTube for commenting in a perspicacious and on-topic manner.
LOLBOT was also preemptively banned from editing Wikipedia. "We don't consider this sort of thing a suitable use of the encyclopedia," sniffed administrator WikiFiddler451, who said it had nothing to do with his having been one of the human test subjects picked as a computer.
"This is a marvellous achievement, and shows great progress toward goals I've worked for all my life," said Professor Kevin Warwick of the University of Reading, confirming his status as a system failing the Turing test.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
Yeah, there's a huge problem with the Turing Test, which is that you have to distinguish between a computer and a person drawn from the pool of humans intelligent and aware enough to have learned to speak and use a keyboard.
Unfortunately, as YouTube (and even /.) comments demonstrate, there is no lower limit to the intellectual capacity of a person who is still capable of speaking and using a keyboard.
It isn't a problem at all: the Turing test is not supposed to demonstrate that the machine is a rocket scientist. The test succeeds if the person conducting it can't reliably distinguish between the machine and the human. Just find human subjects whose intelligence is comparable to the machine being tested. For example, running it on the typical Slashbot, you can successfully prove the intelligence of toasters.
My experience has been that the perceived gender of the bot plays a great bit into the believable nature of the bot due to response expectations.
This, at least, only holds true with a male chatter and a 'female' bot - and I'm not talking about virtual sex chat or anything like that. A person can, for a substantial period of time, be tricked by a 'flirty' bot that comes across as a cute, dumb female. It's kind of funny to see a (sub-average intelligence, I'd guess) person hold a running dialog/virtual relationship for several months with a bot.
It's also much easier to trick someone when they don't know they're being tricked, and where there is no preconception of prior familiarity (IE, such as on an IRC 'chat' channel). It'd be a good tactic to employ by the FBI, I think.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
If speak in manner of Yoda you do, keep up with it a bot can not.
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Wonder if japanese-speaking bot would fare better, I do. Similar, Yoda-speak and Japanese grammar, are.
It's not stupid. It's Advanced.
Did you ever read the post I was responding to?
Welcome to Slashdot, bitch.
That's nothing - I've been sleeping with a bot for 22 years.
Your hand is not cybernetic! Now, write that on the blackboard 500 times.
Disclaimer: The opinions and actions of the US Gov't are in no way representative of those held by this author or its ci
The problem isn't that bots get smarter. The problem is that people get dumber.
Usually, and quite sadly, the distinguishing feature is that the bot has better typing skills.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
A person can, for a substantial period of time, be tricked by a 'flirty' bot that comes across as a cute, dumb female. It's kind of funny to see a (sub-average intelligence, I'd guess) person hold a running dialog/virtual relationship for several months with a bot.
Anything to boost my ego. I've personally set up six bots which I have a long-distance relationship with. I go home after work to my (real life) girlfriend and I sit there listening to her complaints but still feeling smug.
It's the only way to deal with it, besides nuking her from orbit.
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
New tshirt for modding trolls: Go away, or I will replace you with a very small shell script.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
Usually, and quite sadly, the distinguishing feature is that the bot has better typing skills.
Only because the guy who programmed it was a good typist.
Next development: Entropy-based typing errors.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
The real test is convincing your friends that you're actually a bot. I was once lanning Counterstrike with some mates, using a dodgy 3rd party utility to provide bots. These bots had some pretty amusing chatter, and after a while I decided to change my name to one similar to the bots. I pretended my name wasn't showing up due to a bug (which wasn't hard to believe with this program), and then started dropping increasingly more personal messages directed at my mates. Had them quite freaked out until I couldn't stop myself laughing any more.
The reverse can work too. Ages ago I built a bot that would answer chat attempts with randomly selected "fortune" quotes, stripped of their bylines and biased by the presence of nouns that matched those found in the other party's message. I left it running as my "away" message on the mainframe at a large university (where people would chat randomly to you all the time)
I didn't bother saving "my" side of the conversation , so I'm sure I missed some hilarious exchanges, but just reading the other side's messages shows that girls, in particular, would keep chatting with my bot far beyond the point where guys would realize it was a bot and give up.
My favorite was a girl who kept a running dialog going for nearly a day and a half. She would occasionally express surprise at how fast I could type (no delay in bot response) but otherwise seemed convinced that the bot was really human.
That conversation only ended when the bot apparently chose to say something incredibly offensive to her (I wish I knew what it was). She told the bot to "stop talking to me" several times, apparently never picking up on the fact that it auto-responded every time she tried to get the last word in.
-- The reader anything less than completely failing to not misunderstand this sig is cursed.