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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.
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)
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
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?
ya i no wat u mean som ppl jst cant be bothered to spll or pnctuate
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
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.
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.
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
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 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.