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Turing Test Passed

schwit1 (797399) writes "Eugene Goostman, a computer program pretending to be a young Ukrainian boy, successfully duped enough humans to pass the iconic test. The Turing Test which requires that computers are indistinguishable from humans — is considered a landmark in the development of artificial intelligence, but academics have warned that the technology could be used for cybercrime. Computing pioneer Alan Turing said that a computer could be understood to be thinking if it passed the test, which requires that a computer dupes 30 per cent of human interrogators in five-minute text conversations."

432 comments

  1. Turing Test Failed by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    The test itself failed and is meaningless.

    1. Re:Turing Test Failed by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      Why do you think the test failed and is meaningless?

      --ELIZA

    2. Re:Turing Test Failed by meerling · · Score: 3, Informative

      Last I heard, there were heavy restrictions on what types of questions could be asked.
      Second, from what I've seen, they are little more than cleverly created scripts, and as such, despite them fooling a few people, are in no way indicative of machine intelligence.

    3. Re:Turing Test Failed by EuclideanSilence · · Score: 5, Insightful

      It's a bit of an underhanded way to pass to pretend to be someone who doesn't speak English natively. The point of the test is to have a conversation for 5 minutes, not 5 minutes of "oh I can't understand you because I'm from Ukraine".

    4. Re:Turing Test Failed by Spy+Handler · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Not only that, a non-native speaker who is a child.

      5 minutes of "oh I can't understand you because I'm from Ukraine" plus 5 minutes of "oh I don't know about that because I'm only 13".

    5. Re:Turing Test Failed by Culture20 · · Score: 5, Funny

      Heck, one of my first programs mimicked an insensate child. Here's some of the responses:





      And I'm sure it used fewer lines of code.

    6. Re:Turing Test Failed by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

      Is it because you think that the test is failed because 30% on a small child doesn't seem anything like the real turing test that it is also meaningless?

    7. Re:Turing Test Failed by marcello_dl · · Score: 5, Funny

      I'd say the test is obsolete. It's not measuring the advances in AI, but the involution of humans. Have you looked at Facebook status messages?

      --
      ---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
    8. Re:Turing Test Failed by aldousd666 · · Score: 0

      still though, it's an improvement over past attempts. I think complaining about this is kind of like complaining about the fact that 'magicians' aren't using 'real' magic. Of course it's a trick/algorithm. What's the problem with a more convincing algorithm than the last attempts getting a little praise for it?

      --
      Speak for yourself.
    9. Re:Turing Test Failed by Opportunist · · Score: 4, Funny

      You may have passed the Turing Test, but you sure as hell failed the Whooosh-Test.

      --
      We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
    10. Re:Turing Test Failed by Concerned+Onlooker · · Score: 5, Funny

      Someone please verify, but I think we have a double-Whoosh here.

      --
      http://www.rootstrikers.org/
    11. Re:Turing Test Failed by Man+On+Pink+Corner · · Score: 1

      Yeah, it was a stupid idea to begin with, from an otherwise-brilliant man.

    12. Re:Turing Test Failed by Kuroji · · Score: 0

      David Copperfield doesn't try to tell me that I just don't understand his act because it's something he picked up overseas while he clumsily goes through it with obvious stunt doubles.

      Penn and Teller don't try to convince me that I shouldn't be wearing my glasses when I watch them on stage and that I just don't "get it" and that I should believe they really are wizards.

      Your reasoning is flawed, and this test was fundamentally flawed.

    13. Re:Turing Test Failed by TheRhinoplast · · Score: 2

      Computing... Verification complete.

    14. Re:Turing Test Failed by aldousd666 · · Score: 1

      It's still better than previous attempts. That's the point. Nobody claimed the machine is actually a thinking entity. It's just a good enough algorithm to fool some of the people some of the time. Which is better than before. Where is the problem?

      --
      Speak for yourself.
    15. Re:Turing Test Failed by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You are an idiot. How on earth does one follow from the other?

    16. Re:Turing Test Failed by ArcadeMan · · Score: 4, Funny

      I've got this terrible pain in all the diodes down my left hand side.

      --MARVIN

    17. Re:Turing Test Failed by Jane+Q.+Public · · Score: 5, Interesting

      You may consider it verified... subjectively, by a panel of judges, under very narrowly defined circumstances.

      In more seriousness, GP makes a very important point. Not only was this nothing like a real Turing test (a computer would have to fool the average person in more generalized and everyday circumstances for that to happen), the real point here is that we have learned since the days of Turing that even the full-blown Turing test doesn't really indicate much of anything.

      People were fooled (really, really fooled) by Eliza way back in the day. It doesn't mean squat.

    18. Re:Turing Test Failed by gweihir · · Score: 1

      Turing had a far too good opinion of the human race (possibly not anymore towards the end of his life, when they had him chemically castrated because they did not like his homosexuality...), hence his parametrization sucks. Given that 90-95% of the human race are idiots that see what they want to see and not what is there, passing a Turing test involves just the right kind of deception, but no actual intelligence. The only thing the Turing test proves is hence that many humans do not have actual effective intelligence. The mental abilities of these morons is not what an AI needs to have in order to be useful.

      --
      Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
    19. Re:Turing Test Failed by gweihir · · Score: 1

      Indeed. The whole thing has basically degraded into a PR stunt and has nothing in common with Turing's idea.

      --
      Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
    20. Re:Turing Test Failed by OneAhead · · Score: 1

      No, it isn't; just read some of the other posts in this thread. They're trying to sell it as an improvement over past attempts, and the overselling is what we're complaining about.

    21. Re:Turing Test Failed by lgw · · Score: 5, Interesting

      The Turing test is a great test if done properly (Turing wasn't envisioning Twitter). While it's hard to pin down a good definition of sapience/intelligence (people want to keep redefining it to what humans have and no computer or animal has demonstrated this year), a good answer comes from studying communication. Intelligence in that sense is the ability to resolve the ambiguity of natural language by interaction as well as context.

      In a very shallow way, search engines do that now - with a big enough data set they don't need an abstract mental model to ask "did you mean X?" But that's not really interactive - it's a single suggestion, with nowhere to go from there. When you're walking your dog and someone greets you with "hey, that's a nice dog" is that a content-free politeness, a flirtation, a discussion about dog breeding, a polite reminder that your neighbors are watching to make sure you clean up after the dog?

      Part of being a socialized human is resolving that sort of ambiguity gracefully. We have an abstract mental model of other people and their motivations (learned from growing up with others) and we can use it without even noticing how neat that is that we can do that. Posing as someone young and socially awkward precisely defeats the purpose of the test.

      Another sort of conversation that's hard to simulate is the way enthusiasts about something technical will talk. While it's easy for the computer to have all the technical details handy for something like a sports car enthusiast and tuner, or a baseball stats hound, the test is in the way people actually talk about that stuff. You see a lot of it on /.. Broad, passionate over-generalizations challenged, emotional argument becoming hot as first but then cooling as you discover that what you're really talking about is two different specific data points, and don't really disagree about anything important, just were over-generalizing from different things. That sort of conversation require both a social abstraction and an abstraction of the topic at hand. E.g. "you think Honda engines are better because you think X is important in an engine, while I think Toyota engines are better because I think Y is important" to mutually understand that requires more than just a knowledge of parts lists, you have to understand why someone would care.

      IMO, if you have an abstract mental model of both people and the meaningful objects in the world (and, critically, yourself), and you make decisions based on modeling the hypothetical results of those choices, you are sapient/intelligent. Without invoking the supernatural, that's all there is to have.

      --
      Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
    22. Re:Turing Test Failed by Jarik+C-Bol · · Score: 4, Insightful

      As the old saying goes: "Is a Turing test valid if the human is an idiot?"

      --
      I've decided to Diversify my Holdings. I've divided my cash between my left and right pockets, instead of all in one.
    23. Re:Turing Test Failed by Rolman · · Score: 1

      Perhaps the test itself is obsolete now, since it assumes the types of social communication available at the time.

      In another post, I wonder about humans actually flunking the test. I believe this is true in an era where information is so easy to transfer to and from machines and the expectations from human to human interaction have become shallow.

      Maybe today's social communication has changed and has been streamlined so much that we don't have to assume or expect human-like intelligence at all anymore when interacting with either people or machines.

      --
      - Otaku no naka no otaku, otaking da!!!
    24. Re:Turing Test Failed by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Original AC confirms. That must have been the Red Arrows crossing over Opportunist's head. Nobody else could get two planes quite that close together quite that close to the ground.

    25. Re:Turing Test Failed by spire3661 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      There are plenty of people who think Free Will is a myth and that we are just a collection of clever scripts.

      --
      Good-bye
    26. Re:Turing Test Failed by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Plus some "I'm 13 and what is this"

    27. Re:Turing Test Failed by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It is better in abusing the rules. That doesn't means the AI is a better chatter than previous attempts. But, hey, if it allows us to replace lawyers with Ukrainian kid robots I'm all for it.

    28. Re:Turing Test Failed by tommeke100 · · Score: 1

      I also sometimes think the test failed and is meaningless.

    29. Re:Turing Test Failed by AK+Marc · · Score: 1

      The easiest way to cause a failure is generate an illogical emotional response. Insult the other person's mother, or ignore their statements, something that causes anger or frustration, and not necessarily predictable.

      The more the tester would fail a Turing test (a pissed of 12 year old, being dumb), the more they can cause a failure.

    30. Re:Turing Test Failed by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Turing never ruled out this sort of conversation...you act as if this is somehow an impossible conversation that humans would never engage in.

      Typical Slashdot hater trying to be so smart and clever and ending up looking like a complete moron.

    31. Re: Turing Test Failed by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

      Pretty good, but you don't fool me, robot.

    32. Re: Turing Test Failed by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Ha, ha. Fooled you. Jane Q Public is actually a conversational bot.

    33. Re:Turing Test Failed by paskie · · Score: 4, Insightful

      What has been conducted precisely matches Turing's proposed immitation game. I don't know what do you mean by a "full-blown Turing test", the immitiation game is what it has always meant, including the 30% bar (because the human has three options - human, machine, don't know). Of coure, it is nowadays not considered a final goal, but it is still a useful landmark even if we have a long way to go.

      That's the trouble with AI, the expectation are perpetuouly shifting. A few years in the past, a hard task is considered impossible for computers to achieve, or at least many years away. Then it's pased and the verdict prompty shifts to "well, it wasn't that hard anyway and doesn't mean much", and a year from now we take the new capability of machines as a given.

      --
      It's not the fall that kills you. It's the sudden stop at the end. -Douglas Adams
    34. Re:Turing Test Failed by Javaman59 · · Score: 4, Funny

      Computing... Verification complete.

      You seem like a sensible person.

      --
      I'm a software visionary. I don't code.
    35. Re:Turing Test Failed by jeremyp · · Score: 4, Insightful

      People were fooled (really, really fooled) by Eliza way back in the day. It doesn't mean squat.

      No. They weren't. I speak as somebody who's had a go with Eliza and you could spot that it was a computer program in a couple of minutes if you wanted to. It's more likely that people were suspending their disbelief than really fooled.

      --
      All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe
    36. Re:Turing Test Failed by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yep. "Delu-u-u-sions, Mr. Wordsworth!"

      Stunning how prescient Serling was with "The Twilight Zone", though. Or, given the medium, how predictively programming. What you fear the most, etc. I don't watch the tube much anymore, anyway.

      Full disclosure: I am an atheist, but I certainly don't need a state to decide this for me. A higher power has already made that determination, as it were. I see no contradiction there, either, nor anything mystical. How's that for beyond freedom and dignity?

      The Obsolete Man

    37. Re:Turing Test Failed by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Choose to believe in free will and if you're right you chose to be right & if you're wrong, well, you had no choice.

    38. Re:Turing Test Failed by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      He also didn't rule out not having a common language because its stupid.

    39. Re:Turing Test Failed by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Turing helped fight against the nazis so suspect he may have had some clue as to how bad people can be.

    40. Re:Turing Test Failed by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      My name is Sarah Palin and mum say I'm almost Russian...
      almost

    41. Re:Turing Test Failed by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I wont try sapience but when people say 'Bob is intelligent' it seems to me they mean Bob has a useful mental difference.
      That definition in the last paragraph is thought provoking and may well be a suitable definition for sapience and non-comparative intelligence. Thanks for that :)

    42. Re:Turing Test Failed by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Turing never ruled out this sort of conversation...

      Probably because he expected people to have some fucking common sense.

    43. Re: Turing Test Failed by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I wonder if this is indicative of an of overall upward trend in artificial intelligence, or a downward trend in actual intelligence?

    44. Re:Turing Test Failed by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      In an icecream truck without windows, from the media reports, apparently.

    45. Re: Turing Test Failed by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yo! Sysop here!

    46. Re:Turing Test Failed by TapeCutter · · Score: 1

      Who pissed in your cornflakes? Calling it "fundamentally flawed" is meaningless without an explanation. Why do you appear to believe these people went to the Uri Geller school of wizardry, what are the false claims you are objecting to? - Assuming you actually know something about AI, please don't say Searl's "Chinese room" because it's a philosophical strawman.

      --
      And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
    47. Re:Turing Test Failed by TapeCutter · · Score: 1

      Allow me to butt in :) I can see your POV but that's not how I read the thread, naturally I haven't read TFA so I'm not going to comment on their experiment or the level of hyperbole. The way I read this thread is that many of the posters are claiming that the TT itself is a meaningless test. Thing is none of them seem capable of stating why they disagree with Turing - That's what I and a few others, are complaining about.

      --
      And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
    48. Re:Turing Test Failed by ArcadeMan · · Score: 1

      Why do you think the test failed and is meaningless?

      --Deanna Troi

    49. Re:Turing Test Failed by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I was a BBS operator in the early 1990s. I had a game, which I titled "in case you really need for chat". It was an Eliza program, that I somewhat tuned to speak as I would (and translated to my local language). Plus, the user got to see the pretended typing in real time — Even with some typos and corrections.

      Looking at the log files was *really* worth a laugh. But it made me feel wrong — Some users left in disgust, after "I" had insulted them.

      And yes, they were not really aware I was playing a Turing test on them, so I don't know if this would have validity. But, by 1994 standards, I do believe it was quite an achievement (or perhaps, my users were mostly silly teens just like myself, and not worthy deciders for what constituted intelligent behaviour).

      (Or maybe I'm *that* stupid in real life)

    50. Re:Turing Test Failed by Motard · · Score: 1

      I wrote a better Eliza clone back in the early '80's.

      Me:

      My dog has fleas.

      Eugene Goostman:

      No, we don't have a dog at home.

      Me (circa 1982):

      My dog has fleas.

      SAI (stupid artificial intelligence):

      Oh? Tell me more about your dog....

      Busted in one. Who the hell were these judges?

    51. Re:Turing Test Failed by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      How do you know they where humans talking to your bot? :)

    52. Re:Turing Test Failed by phantomfive · · Score: 3, Interesting
      Bernie Cosell has this story about an exec being horribly tricked by his early Eliza bot:

      "I got a little glimmer of fame because Danny Bobrow wrote up 'A Turing Test Passed".....One of the execs at BBN came into the PDP-I computer room and thought that Danny Bobrow was dialed into that and thought he was talking to Danny. For us folk that had played with ELIZA, we all recognized the responses and we didn't know how humanlike they were. But for somebody who wasn't real familiar with ELIZA, it seemed perfectly reasonable. It was obnnoxious but he actually thought it was Danny Bobrow. 'But tell me more about--' 'Earlier, you said you wanted to go to the client's place.' Things like that almost made sense in context, until eventually he typed something and he forgot to hit the go button, so the program didn't respond. And he thought that Danny had disconnected. So he called Danny up at home and yelled at him. And Danny has absolutely no idea what was going on......."

      (reported in Coders at Work).

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    53. Re:Turing Test Failed by Jane+Q.+Public · · Score: 4, Insightful

      What has been conducted precisely matches Turing's proposed immitation game.

      NO, it DEFINITELY does NOT. For just one example, it tries to get around the "natural language" stipulation by pretending to be someone who doesn't fully know that language, and uses a simplified version instead.

      That is a very clear attempt to subvert the rules.

      I could go on, but it isn't necessary. It wasn't a real Turing test. We can leave aside the other nuances because the first criterion wasn't met.

    54. Re:Turing Test Failed by Jane+Q.+Public · · Score: 1

      No. They weren't. I speak as somebody who's had a go with Eliza and you could spot that it was a computer program in a couple of minutes if you wanted to. It's more likely that people were suspending their disbelief than really fooled.

      The fact that YOU weren't fooled is not evidence that PEOPLE weren't fooled. They were, in droves, and it has been documented in peer-reviewed papers of the day.

      I appreciate your anecdote, and I flatter myself that it would not have fooled me, either, but our anecdotes do not negate the scientific literature.

    55. Re:Turing Test Failed by gweihir · · Score: 1

      There is a huge difference between "bad" and "stupid". Let me give you an example: Posting as AC is bad, because it means you evade social control. It does not mean you are stupid, just amoral.

      --
      Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
    56. Re:Turing Test Failed by RespekMyAthorati · · Score: 1

      the immitiation game is what it has always meant, including the 30% bar

      Wrong!

      Turing predicted that in the near future, computers would be able to fool 30% of people in such a test.
      This was a remarkable claim at the time, given that truly general-purpose programmable computers didn't yet exist.

      Turing never specified any "bar" above which the system would be considered to have passed the test.

    57. Re:Turing Test Failed by eclectro · · Score: 1

      Can you elaborate on that?

      --
      Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
    58. Re:Turing Test Failed by LordLimecat · · Score: 1

      Nobody claimed the machine is actually a thinking entity

      This guy is.

    59. Re:Turing Test Failed by flyingsquid · · Score: 1

      What has been conducted precisely matches Turing's proposed imitation game.

      The question is, how informative is an imitation game? If we've shifted the goalposts I think it's because these ones just aren't very informative. The implicit argument of the Turing Test is that a sufficient good imitation of intelligence, indistinguishable from the real thing, must at some level be intelligent. Basically, fake it until you make it. Like in Blade Runner- the replicants remember, love, fear, hate; they do everything humans do in a way indistinguishable from us, so they must at some level be human. Pretend long enough and hard enough and eventually it becomes the real thing. It's a plausible argument on the surface, but sort of blows up on closer examination.

      For example, years ago there was an effort by psychologists to rehabilitate sociopaths with extensive talk therapy, teaching them to share and be more in touch with their feelings. It didn't really work, though. It taught them how to speak the language of empathy and say the right things to convince people that they were caring human beings, but underneath they were still sociopaths, given a chance they'd go off on another killing spree. Learning to act like caring human beings didn't actually make them caring beings. They were still monsters, but now they just had better camouflage. Imitating empathy didn't actually make them empathetic.

      Let's choose another example- perhaps more than hypothetical in light of Turing's tragic life and the culture of his time. Let's imagine a man, a criminal deviant who likes men, but instead he pretends to be a normal man who likes women. He has women friends. He goes on dates with women. He marries a woman. They have children, and live together in a house in the suburbs. If he pretends long enough, and hard enough, for years and years, does he at some point stop becoming a criminal deviant and start becoming normal? I'd argue that the Turing Test and its emphasis on imitation might say a lot more about what was going on inside Turing's head than inside the machine.

    60. Re:Turing Test Failed by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      There is a huge difference between "bad" and "stupid". Let me give you an example: Posting as AC is bad, because it means you evade social control. It does not mean you are stupid, just amoral.

      You can thank GCHQ & the NSA for me posting anon. I'm not trying to evade you, I'm trying to evade them.
      Also I'm not amoral.

    61. Re: Turing Test Failed by KevinKing6366 · · Score: 0

      Nice examples. They illustrate the difficulty of changing the true nature of something. But the question is, if we are made of nothing more than very organized atoms (like computers), then how did 'we' make the leap to thinking feeling beings? For the perfect analogy, wiki the China Room.

    62. Re:Turing Test Failed by paskie · · Score: 1

      I don't think pretending to be a person who isn't fluent in English is cheating in the immitation game, as long as the conversation still happens in English; remember, they are still talking to the human too! This result does say a lot about computer capabilities, and may have implications in spam, but also e.g. call center automation etc.

      I agree that based on this experience, we can add some extra restrictions to the immitation game to make it a much more useful benchmark for progress in AI.

      --
      It's not the fall that kills you. It's the sudden stop at the end. -Douglas Adams
    63. Re:Turing Test Failed by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      For example, years ago there was an effort by psychologists to rehabilitate sociopaths with extensive talk therapy, teaching them to share and be more in touch with their feelings. It didn't really work, though. It taught them how to speak the language of empathy and say the right things to convince people that they were caring human beings, but underneath they were still sociopaths, given a chance they'd go off on another killing spree. Learning to act like caring human beings didn't actually make them caring beings. They were still monsters, but now they just had better camouflage. Imitating empathy didn't actually make them empathetic.

      http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-neuroscientist-who-discovered-he-was-a-psychopath-180947814/?no-ist

      This would suggest it is possible for psychopaths for have empathy.
      I know you specified sociopath but that is part of psychopathy as of the latest DSM (I'm not personally an expert so have to rely on others)

    64. Re:Turing Test Failed by Xyrus · · Score: 1

      You seem like a sensible person.

      I agree. And because you are so sensible you should probably try this one amazing product.

      --
      ~X~
    65. Re:Turing Test Failed by T.E.D. · · Score: 1

      (Turing wasn't envisioning Twitter).

      I'm pretty sure most of the tweets tagged with #tcot are sent by bots.

    66. Re:Turing Test Failed by bluefoxlucid · · Score: 1

      including the 30% bar (because the human has three options - human, machine, don't know).

      Hey dude, I have a lottery ticket for you. You should pay me like 50 bucks for it. You have a 50% chance of being a billionaire: either you'll win or you won't.

    67. Re:Turing Test Failed by gweihir · · Score: 1

      Well, either you are stupid or lying. Slashdot is pseudonymous, i.e. account-based recognition is already impossible. On the other hand, if they do IP-address or traffic content analysis, being an AC will not protect you.

      --
      Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
    68. Re:Turing Test Failed by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      No, lottery tickets have shit loads of options.

    69. Re:Turing Test Failed by dbIII · · Score: 1

      They were, in droves

      I'm not so sure, it would be hard to pin down the number of people that played along after they worked out it was a bot from transcripts alone. You can hear it today with some of the current recordings of VoIP chatbots out on the net where some people are obviously fooled, some hang up obviously not fooled, some are playing along and clearly not fooled, others have worked out somewhere in the middle because they are clearly playing along by the end. I had plenty of "conversations" with Eliza back in the day despite running the thing myself so knowing it was a program but the transcripts may have made it look like I was "fooled" despite playing it as a game.
      However I must concede that the literature is very likely to take all of that into account and control the conditions.
      I do know that when I tried to trick people with Eliza it never worked for more than a few seconds, but there could have been a lot of reasons for that.

    70. Re:Turing Test Failed by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The Turing Test, requires the examiner communicate with 2 subjects with the knowledge that 1 of them is a computer. After some period of communicating with them via written questions the examiner is asked which one they think is the computer.

      An AI can be considered to have passed in it can under large sample manage to get to 50/50 success at being declared the "human" (the examiner's ability to out the AI is indistinguishable from a blind guess).

      It isn't particularly useful as a general AI test. What it is good for is conveying the concept that "if humans can't distinguish between the computer and a human, the computer may as well be considered an human level AI".

    71. Re:Turing Test Failed by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You should only ask this "ukrainian boy"

      patsan, RU ili UA?

      good luck with that answer ...

    72. Re:Turing Test Failed by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Even the Turing test standard has been lowered. Now it is for a child. About like American education.

    73. Re:Turing Test Failed by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Being AC and going through Tor will (to an extent, I'm not on the most wanted list or anything). Even without Tor though it makes it more difficult to build up a profile on me as errors multiply.
      Also you are wrong about which of us is trying to evade basic social convention as you have been the one insulting me, not vice versa.

    74. Re:Turing Test Failed by TsuruchiBrian · · Score: 1

      This was *a* Turing test, not *the* Turing test. This program fooled 33% of judges it was a 13 year old Ukranian boy in 5 minute conversations.

      Contrast this to the general Turing test. Imagine your best friend. Recall all the conversations you had with him. What if I told you he was actually a robot. Why were you able to be tricked by this robot? Why couldn't you tell that he was just following his programming? He just seemed so real. This is what passing the Turing test is.

      What was done in this article is like jumping and claiming to have flown. I suspect that if any of these judges had to spend longer amounts of time (e.g. a year) trying to get to know this 13 year old Ukranian boy, it would have become obvious that this boy was either not a real human or that he was severely mentally disabled. The alternative is that the boy is actually really the first artificially intelligent being.

      *The* Turing Test (rather than some small subset) is *really* hard to pass. It was designed as a thought experiment as a test *so* impossibly hard to pass that if it ever were passed, you'd have to agree that anything that passed it was sentient (i.e. it can't be passed with just a simple trick). Tragically people's conception of the Turing test is precisely this idea that "once you get a program that can trick a judge with a simple trick, it's intelligent", which absolutely misses the point.

    75. Re:Turing Test Failed by TsuruchiBrian · · Score: 1

      There are also plenty of people who think we are just collections of atoms.

    76. Re:Turing Test Failed by Quirkz · · Score: 1

      GOTO 110
      110: print "I am not a script!"

    77. Re:Turing Test Failed by Darinbob · · Score: 1

      At a lab a few years before I worked there, some people hooked up an "artificial intelligence" system. It involved typing in questions onto a terminal and getting responses back. The trick was that a person was in another room doing the answering, pretending to be an AI. They had some senior people convinced there had been a major break through before the joke was revealed.

    78. Re:Turing Test Failed by Darinbob · · Score: 2

      Me: My dog has no nose.

      Eugene Goostman: But how does he smell?

      Me: Badly.

      Eugene Goostman: I don't get it.

    79. Re:Turing Test Failed by Jane+Q.+Public · · Score: 1

      I'm not so sure, it would be hard to pin down the number of people that played along after they worked out it was a bot from transcripts alone.

      Please read the relevant literature. It was studied in a responsible manner and measurable results were obtained.

    80. Re:Turing Test Failed by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I wouldn't consider it verified if the panel *knew* they were testing for one of n entities. Let's make it triple-blind; the panel go in thinking they're evaluating something other than humanlike behaviour, say even as mundane as social skills in children. Helps if the panel are made up of very experienced child psychologists, or even better, actual parents.

      ~ihtoit (posting as AC on someone else's wifi)

    81. Re:Turing Test Failed by dbIII · · Score: 1

      Fair enough, but for whatever reason I never saw anyone fooled by Eliza for more than a few seconds back in the day - perhaps it was clues in the environment etc.

    82. Re:Turing Test Failed by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Your call is important to us.

    83. Re:Turing Test Failed by sbaker · · Score: 1

      I think that to pass the Turing test, you have to tell the judges that the entity they are about to talk to *might* be a computer program. Eliza worked because people had never encountered a computer that even tried to be remotely human - so the assumption was that this was a real person from the outset. Also Eliza is a psychologist - so she gets to ask all the questions and steer the conversation into territory she can actually handle. Responses to things she can't parse are things like "So how does that make YOU feel?" - which work in that situation.

      In a real turing test, the questions are completely open and the judge is initially highly sceptical that this is a real human.

      Judges in these contests always seem to low-ball the questions. Ask "How would Santa Claus fend off a horde of attacking Ninjas?"

      Those are insanely difficult questions for an AI to get right without some neutral "I don't feel like answering that right now" kind of response. A 13 year old kid would leap in and start wondering whether Santa could fly away in his sleigh and drop presents on them...or set the elves loose on them...or ask another question in return, like "Can the reindeer help out?"

      Something that requires creativity - not just knowledge (which Watson could pull off) or a decent use of the English language (which Eliza could manage to some degree).

      --
      www.sjbaker.org
    84. Re:Turing Test Failed by HeckRuler · · Score: 1

      I think that to pass the Turing test, you have to tell the judges that the entity they are about to talk to *might* be a computer program. Eliza worked because people had never encountered a computer that even tried to be remotely human - so the assumption was that this was a real person from the outset

      An interesting aspect of the Turing Test is that it's dependent upon sociological factors. Back in the 60's, like you said, it was assumed that the thing on the other side was a human. But as time goes forward and we get flooded with clever ads, chatbots, brand-dropping honeypot girlfriends, smart cars, automated grocery tellers, and AI in general, we'll be more suspicious of the humanity of EVERYTHING around us.

      It'll be harder for AI's to pass the Turing Test as time goes on.

      It'll also be harder for us to pass the Turing Test. It's a jarring experience to answer the phone and have the person swear at getting voice-mail.

    85. Re:Turing Test Failed by Archangel+Michael · · Score: 1

      Turns out, Common Sense isn't that common after all.

      --
      Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
    86. Re:Turing Test Failed by ThurstonMoore · · Score: 1

      You can choose a ready guide in some celestial voice
      If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice
      You can choose from phantom fears and kindness that can kill
      I will choose a path that's clear
      I will choose freewill

    87. Re:Turing Test Failed by OneAhead · · Score: 1

      It seems I'm not the only one with my POV.

  2. I thought the slashdot moderators passed... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    ... the Turing test a long time ago. That also shows that we should not put too much faith into AI, otherwise we would not have gotten slashdot beta

    1. Re:I thought the slashdot moderators passed... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      No, the turing test requires an AI to convincingly emulate a human, not a crack-addled monkey.

  3. intelligence by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    yes well that's turing. they're intelligent when they do something useful.

    1. Re:intelligence by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Um, computers do an awful lot that's useful.

  4. Dupe 30% of humans? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Damn dogs will pass that test.

    1. Re:Dupe 30% of humans? by Tablizer · · Score: 5, Funny

      Damn dogs will pass that test.

      One dog would have if it wasn't for those meddling kids.

  5. Thirty percent? by mcgrew · · Score: 2

    That's a pretty low bar. So to pass the test a computer needs three very low IQ subjects and seven normal people? Hell, the Alice program would probably pass. How about a more reasonable percentage, like 95%?

    1. Re:Thirty percent? by NoNonAlphaCharsHere · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Because most humans would fail?

    2. Re:Thirty percent? by nitehawk214 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      By random chance you would detect the computer 50% of the time, so that should be the goal.

      Still 30% as "passing" seems unreasonably low.

      --
      I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
    3. Re:Thirty percent? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Not when this test was proposed and this has been a very long time coming.

    4. Re:Thirty percent? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      If the computer is exactly like a human, it would only get 50% half the time. Half of humans would fail the test too: we arn't trying to make a computer more human than humans: Aiming for more than 50% is just silly.

      The whole idea is neat, but really not a great test of intelligence. We can't make something indistinguishable from birds, so we can't fly? Being able to impersonate something isn't really a good measure of mastery of a subject. I can't impersonate you, but that doesn't make me subhuman.

    5. Re:Thirty percent? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Anyone who uses IQ as a measure of intelligence is likely to fail any meaningful test. Its quasi-religious following today is as hilarious as phrenology was a century ago.

    6. Re:Thirty percent? by bsolar · · Score: 4, Informative
      Is that 30% success rate actually meant to be the threshold to pass the test? From the article on Wikipedia it simply looks like a prediction about how AIs in the future will fare:

      Turing predicted that machines would eventually be able to pass the test; in fact, he estimated that by the year 2000, machines with 10 GB of storage would be able to fool 30% of human judges in a five-minute test, and that people would no longer consider the phrase "thinking machine" contradictory.

    7. Re:Thirty percent? by hackus · · Score: 1

      Sort of like our educational system.

      Tons of PhD's who know lots of stuff it would seem as they were at the top of their classes to memorize and take exams.

      Sadly when you employ a bunch of them to write an operating system for a tough real world problem, they fail.

      But, seem to do just fine as long as they are at a University.

      I think the best example I can think of is Microsoft's veritable army of PhD's it employed to kill POSIX Unix architecture on the worlds exchanges. The idea was to deploy Windows on all of the exchanges and replace the UNIX systems they were using.

      It not only failed, but cost the exchange in London and New York about 100 times the cost of the project.

      --
      Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
    8. Re:Thirty percent? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      You've got a good point, but in fact the entire setup of the test is nonsensical. Here's how it should work:

      1) Have a judge have two conversations, not necessarily at the same time, one with a human and one with a computer. (Obviously the judge does not know who is who.)
      2) Give these conversations some time - more than five minutes, for sure.
      3) At the end, have the judge declare who they think is the computer and who they think is the human.
      4) Do this repeatedly, and use statistical methods to determine, at certain confidence levels, whether the judges were doing better than random guessing.

      When someone's devised a program that fooled, say, n=200 judges whose judgement was tantamount to random guessing at a confidence level of p=0.01, start the presses.

    9. Re:Thirty percent? by gweihir · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Most humans _are_ stupid. AI on their level would not be useful at all.

      --
      Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
    10. Re:Thirty percent? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Really, you need to set an empirically defined nonarbitrary percent. It would be straightforward to implement. Just have a control condition where you have actual people communicating, and ask a random sample of other people to decide whether those people are computers or humans. The percent of people guessing "human" would give you your threshold you need a computer to pass.

    11. Re:Thirty percent? by penguinoid · · Score: 0

      I would expect any proper AI to pass the Touring Test well over 50% of the time. This is because I don't expect we can make an AI that is the equal of a human, without making it self-improving, so that it should quickly surpass humans.

      --
      Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
    12. Re:Thirty percent? by Javaman59 · · Score: 1

      You've got a good point, but in fact the entire setup of the test is nonsensical. Here's how it should work:

      1) Have a judge have two conversations, not necessarily at the same time, one with a human and one with a computer. (Obviously the judge does not know who is who.) 2) Give these conversations some time - more than five minutes, for sure. 3) At the end, have the judge declare who they think is the computer and who they think is the human. 4) Do this repeatedly, and use statistical methods to determine, at certain confidence levels, whether the judges were doing better than random guessing.

      When someone's devised a program that fooled, say, n=200 judges whose judgement was tantamount to random guessing at a confidence level of p=0.01, start the presses.

      Thankyou. Got it.

      Congratulations AC - that is a concise, scientific definition of the test.

      All that these researchers have achieved is to redefine the Turing test downwards, and to redefine it so far downwards that it is a completely different test, sharing only the name. However, I see from Wikipedia that there is some history behind this redefinition. It's as if 30% success, from a blind audience, over 5 minutes may be be a first step towards passing the test - according to some. Yah... like jumping 5 feet in the air is a successful first step towards jumping into orbit, or proving Fermat for n=1..10 is a first step towards proving it for all numbers.

      The OP is a technological achievement, but nothing more. It is not even relevant to the science of the Turing Test

      .

      --
      I'm a software visionary. I don't code.
    13. Re:Thirty percent? by paskie · · Score: 1

      The reaon is simple - the human is also allowed to answer "don't know" in Turing' immitation game. So with purely random anwers, the probability of each is 1/3.

      (I think forcing the judges to pick one would make the results more clear-cut, I'm not sure about Turing's reasons here.)

      Anyway, the 30% bar has been proposed in the original paper and this is what "Turing's test" was _always_ meaning.

      --
      It's not the fall that kills you. It's the sudden stop at the end. -Douglas Adams
    14. Re:Thirty percent? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      If you are making a real attempt it could be a useful first step. What it isn't is prove of a first step of a real attempt.

    15. Re:Thirty percent? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      prove=proof

    16. Re:Thirty percent? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The reaon is simple - the human is also allowed to answer "don't know" in Turing' immitation game. So with purely random anwers, the probability of each is 1/3.

      (I think forcing the judges to pick one would make the results more clear-cut, I'm not sure about Turing's reasons here.)

      If they don't know then replying yes or no could be viewed as junk data.

    17. Re:Thirty percent? by RespekMyAthorati · · Score: 2

      Anyway, the 30% bar has been proposed in the original paper and this is what "Turing's test" was _always_ meaning

      Wrong!
      The 30% figure was a prediction for how far computers would get by the year 2000.

    18. Re:Thirty percent? by RespekMyAthorati · · Score: 1

      Exactly.
      My own suggestion would involve several thousand "judges" from all walks of life,
      conversing with the candidate (50/50 chance of an AI or a human) for 10-15 minutes a day for a year.
      The judges would not be told the nature of the test until after it is over, and if a statistically significant
      number of the them guesses correctly, then this test will be a "fail".

      And what if the system passes the test? It gets to try a harder one.

    19. Re:Thirty percent? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The majority clearly must be, for this shortsighted bs to be modded up.

    20. Re:Thirty percent? by nitehawk214 · · Score: 1

      Ahh, well thats what I get for not reading TFA.

      --
      I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
    21. Re:Thirty percent? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      If we could build AI that worked as well as a kitten, then it would revolutionize our society. What you think of as "stupid" isn't stupid in the AI sense, but a type of willful ignorance and intellectual laziness that characterizes the human condition. That would be easy to replicate in comparison to, for example, building a computer that can see, hear, and navigate as well as a cute little ball of fluff.

    22. Re:Thirty percent? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Actually all but the severely impaired humans are very smart. Don't diss people because they can't code. Most plumbers will end up making more than you in the end.

    23. Re:Thirty percent? by Tablizer · · Score: 1

      Most humans _are_ stupid.

      In the academic or IQ sense you are probably right. However, most humans can navigate and manipulate most physical objects far better than any current AI (aside from highly specialized tasks).

      Further, it appears that most human minds have a lot of processing and memory devoted to socializing, but us slashdotters tend to dismiss that or not notice or even recognize such skills.

      "I can solve a Rubix cube blindfolded, so why can't I get a real date?"

      In short, "stupid" is relative.

    24. Re:Thirty percent? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      *A* person is smart. *People* are dumb pankicky animals, and you know it.

      (no apologies to the screenwriter of Men In Black)

    25. Re:Thirty percent? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      There is an unstated assumption that the judges will never incorrectly assume that a human is a computer. So random guessing isn't really a valid technique to judge with.

  6. Not literally a test by Livius · · Score: 4, Informative

    Should we tell them that the Turing test was a thought experiment and never meant as an actual objective test that would prove anything?

    1. Re:Not literally a test by NoNonAlphaCharsHere · · Score: 5, Funny

      Next you'll say that Turing machines were a thought experiment and never meant to perform calculations in the real world.

    2. Re:Not literally a test by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Why not consult Mr. I Kant concerning the "actual" nature of "objective" while you're at it?

      Look, you're making a leap of faith that there's somebody home whenever you talk to another human being (including yourself, some say), much less a computer. Even then, your odds of being decieved one way or another are rather more than nil. Money talks, bullshit walks, and so on. I'm sure more learned fellows than I can explain this much better than I, but this looks more like a publicity stunt to me than a real achievment. Tuning problem, not Turing.

    3. Re:Not literally a test by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Actually the test is quiet relevant in a country like the UK or US where most of the GDP comes from the service sector. Think of all the call centre jobs that could be automated with this kind of technology.

    4. Re:Not literally a test by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Meant: "Yep, and tell them to refer to Kant, etc." Wasn't disagreeing. Sorry.

    5. Re:Not literally a test by gweihir · · Score: 1

      Naa, that though is too complicated and may not fit into their tiny minds. Remember that Turing was on high genius level. That means something like 95% of the human race cannot actually follow his thoughts.

      --
      Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
    6. Re:Not literally a test by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Uh, telling everyone that your call centers are staffed with Ukrainian boys is unlikely to end well... customer complaints about the quality of servierce would probably be the least of your problems.

    7. Re:Not literally a test by rgmoore · · Score: 1

      It isn't so much that the Turing test was a thought experiment as that it was intended to be a much more stringent test. It was supposed to involve skeptical inquirers who were given as much time as they needed and were allowed to ask open ended questions. He certainly didn't mention any 5 minute time limit; it's a lot easier to fool people with simple tricks like pretending to be an ignorant youngster if you're given a time limit.

      --

      There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.

    8. Re:Not literally a test by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Uh, telling everyone that your call centers are staffed with Ukrainian boys is unlikely to end well... customer complaints about the quality of servierce would probably be the least of your problems.

      Yea, Putin might annex it.

  7. When the bar is too high... by BlackPignouf · · Score: 4, Funny

    When the bar is too high, try limbo instead of pole vault.
    What's next?
    "Yu So Dum, a computer program pretending to be a chinese toddler, successfully duped enough humans to pass the iconic test."

    1. Re:When the bar is too high... by martin-boundary · · Score: 1

      You know, humanity tests don't even need conversation skills. You could take a photo of a fertilized egg and show it to about a billion people, and they would claim it's human.

  8. An autist chat simulator duped 100% of people. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Way back in my college days, I worked in a lab with a guy who wrote a chat bot that babbled on like an autist or otherwise mentally retarded youth would.

    It would dupe 100% of the people who chatted with it. They couldn't distinguish it from an actual autist.

    After seeing this work in action, I learned a very good lesson: the Turing Test is nothing but academic masturbatory fodder. It is not something to be taken seriously.

    1. Re:An autist chat simulator duped 100% of people. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      ... babbled on like an autist or otherwise mentally retarded youth would.

      Autist is not a word, and autism is not a form of mental retardation.

    2. Re:An autist chat simulator duped 100% of people. by mwvdlee · · Score: 0, Troll

      Wow, it actually works! You've got me totally fooled.
      That was exactly like an autist would react.
      Except that a real autist would probably be right when trying to correct others.

      --
      Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
    3. Re:An autist chat simulator duped 100% of people. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It appears that autist was first used in 1968, so I guess it has become a word through usage; fair point. Autism, however, is not a form of mental retardation.

    4. Re:An autist chat simulator duped 100% of people. by lgw · · Score: 2

      No, he would have started his reply with the word "No" as well.

      --
      Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
    5. Re:An autist chat simulator duped 100% of people. by gweihir · · Score: 4, Insightful

      And a chair is not a chair. It seems you are not living in the real world. Except for high functioning autism, autism is a severe mental dysfunction.

      --
      Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
    6. Re:An autist chat simulator duped 100% of people. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Point of order: Austin is indeed a from of mental retardation. Its retardation of "social intelligence" and perception and as opposed to "cognitive intelligence" of conditions like Downs.

      You may not like the moniker, but it is technically correct.

    7. Re:An autist chat simulator duped 100% of people. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      Point of order: Austin is indeed a from of mental retardation.

      I would extend that to most of Texas.

    8. Re:An autist chat simulator duped 100% of people. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      After seeing this work in action, I learned a very good lesson: the Turing Test is nothing but academic masturbatory fodder. It is not something to be taken seriously.

      At the point that you have an AI which can fully mimic a normal intelligent human being during normal interaction enough to be convincing you will have something very interesting in AI. This kind of test is a joke. An AI which can be inserted into a communications channel amd persuade people to do things is something else.

    9. Re:An autist chat simulator duped 100% of people. by AK+Marc · · Score: 0

      autism is not a form of mental retardation.

      Give a definition of mental retardation that I can't re-state autism to match.

    10. Re:An autist chat simulator duped 100% of people. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      If you understood him it is a word.

    11. Re:An autist chat simulator duped 100% of people. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Nahh, most of Texas is just a failure of the sense of taste. Not really a mental issue at all!

    12. Re:An autist chat simulator duped 100% of people. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Well those with HFA might not like being called retarded so why say they are?

    13. Re:An autist chat simulator duped 100% of people. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Below a specific IQ level certainly used to be the technical definition of a retard.IIRC it replace idiot for that as people found idiot insulting.
      Certain people with Autism match it but others don't.

    14. Re:An autist chat simulator duped 100% of people. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Social intelligence is a new invention and retard an older word. Also its not generally taken to refer to social intelligence.
      Most importantly though I wouldn't call someone a retard as its generally considered insulting.

    15. Re: An autist chat simulator duped 100% of people. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      For some I'd describe it as a mental difference not defect. After all if someone is more capable than average in one area and less competent in another, which seems to generally be true for HFA, it might be considered to 'average out the same'. This would make it a difference not a defect.

    16. Re:An autist chat simulator duped 100% of people. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Way back in my college days..

      I strongly doubt that anyone who tosses around a derogatory term like 'autist' like you do has been to college or is even old enough to attend college. Please, go back to /b/ and LURK MOAR, kid, the adults are trying to have a conversation here.

    17. Re: An autist chat simulator duped 100% of people. by Bill,+Shooter+of+Bul · · Score: 1

      Well, its not generally true that people on the autisim spectrum have super powers any more than getting bit by a spider exposed to radiation will.

      Correctly speaking, it is a mental disorder as it is listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders as such. The DSM is the American Psychiatric Association's current understanding of all things mental disordered.

      Keep in mind however, that depression and ADHD is also listed in there.

      --
      Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
    18. Re:An autist chat simulator duped 100% of people. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      By this definition any set of random characters that someone thinks they might be able to guess a meaning for is a word.

    19. Re: An autist chat simulator duped 100% of people. by buybuydandavis · · Score: 1

      Correctly speaking, it is a mental disorder as it is listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders as such. The DSM is the American Psychiatric Association's current understanding of all things mental disordered.

      And you know, whatever the powers that be say is a mental disorder, really is one.

      How long ago was homosexuality classified as a mental disorder in the DSM?

    20. Re: An autist chat simulator duped 100% of people. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      He didn't say mentally ill, or mental disorder; He said mentally defective which isn't the same.

    21. Re: An autist chat simulator duped 100% of people. by Bill,+Shooter+of+Bul · · Score: 1

      No, not at all. But they are the ones who define the terms they use, and that is how they define it. If you have a different opinion, by all means become a psychologist infiltrate their ranks and convince them to change their definition. But you can't logically argue that they currently don't define it as such.

      --
      Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
    22. Re:An autist chat simulator duped 100% of people. by Eythian · · Score: 1

      The Turing test is a thought experiment. It's not a test to "prove we have AI" or anything, though people do use it like that.

    23. Re:An autist chat simulator duped 100% of people. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      We often refer to that as a password...

    24. Re: An autist chat simulator duped 100% of people. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Well they are one of the ones that define. There's also ICD-10 from the WHO, and probably others as well.

    25. Re:An autist chat simulator duped 100% of people. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Wish my users had passwords like that...

    26. Re:An autist chat simulator duped 100% of people. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Dude, Austin is the sanest part of Texas!

    27. Re: An autist chat simulator duped 100% of people. by buybuydandavis · · Score: 1

      But you can't logically argue that they currently don't define it as such.

      Which I wasn't arguing. I argued that appeal to authority, particularly of a demonstrably poor authority, is not a valid argument.

    28. Re:An autist chat simulator duped 100% of people. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      An affliction which slows or halts the psychological (emotional, social, intellectual, etc) growth and development of a person (relative to their peers).

    29. Re:An autist chat simulator duped 100% of people. by gweihir · · Score: 1

      The context was obvious not to include HFAs. Anybody that did not see that is not HFA.

      --
      Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
    30. Re:An autist chat simulator duped 100% of people. by AK+Marc · · Score: 1

      So you'd assert the social development is exactly the same between an autistic person and a "normal" person?

    31. Re:An autist chat simulator duped 100% of people. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      deal with it, sperglord

    32. Re:An autist chat simulator duped 100% of people. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It's true that autism isn't "a form of mental retardation," in the sense that not all forms of autism are associated with below-average intelligence. However, many types of autism do indeed cause/are associated with intellectual disabilities, and the person you quoted did not state explicitly state that autism is fully a subset of intellectual disabilities; the Venn diagram would have overlapping circles.

      And "autist" is a word, as has been pointed out: http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/autism?q=autist#autism__5 (see under "Derivatives")

      I don't think it's considered polite to use the word, but it seems odd that you would object to it and not "mental retardation."

    33. Re: An autist chat simulator duped 100% of people. by Hategrin · · Score: 1

      Please, tell me more about how a person who spends 80 years staring into space, pissing and shitting themselves, and not responding to stimuli shouldn't be judged to have something wrong with them.

      If there is something wrong with a person behaving in such a way, and a another person behaves the same way to some extent, while not as severe but for none the less the same reasons, then wouldn't they also have, to some extent, the same something wrong with them?

    34. Re: An autist chat simulator duped 100% of people. by Hategrin · · Score: 1

      Since we're talking about logical fallacies, nice Red Herring there, but citing an authority's position isn't an "appeal" to the said authority unless you were arguing that same position, which nobody is. All he was saying is that "suffering from mental illness" is the politically correct slang for calling someone a "retard", and that Autism is a mental illness.

      If X is A, and a C is an X, then X is A.

    35. Re: An autist chat simulator duped 100% of people. by Hategrin · · Score: 1

      If X is A, and a C is an X, then a C is an A as well.

      /facepalm

    36. Re: An autist chat simulator duped 100% of people. by Hategrin · · Score: 1

      And nobody was arguing whether or not they were correct in defining it how they did. The only argument is that is how it was defined, not whether it was accurate or correct to define it.

      Whether or not it's true is how you define "retarded". Most idiots would think of some down syndrome patient masturbating on the short buss with drool coming out of his mouth. That isn't how "retardation" was defined in the DSM, it wasn't invented to be nor was it always a derogatory word. Stricly speaking I myself am retarded, I have bi-polar.

      Medically speaking most of the population has some form of retardation or another. Pretending your weaknesses are posative attributes won't make them go away or stop them from causing you difficulty in life.

    37. Re: An autist chat simulator duped 100% of people. by buybuydandavis · · Score: 1

      Medically speaking most of the population has some form of retardation or another. Pretending your weaknesses are posative attributes won't make them go away or stop them from causing you difficulty in life.

      The point others are making is that most *differences* from the mean come with positives *and* negatives. Being different doesn't necessarily mean being worse or being "sick".

    38. Re:An autist chat simulator duped 100% of people. by Your.Master · · Score: 5, Funny

      That's absoexactally right. The worditudinality of an utterance is defined completely by comprehension. Anywhom that says otherwise is being an obnoxialous prescriptivist!

    39. Re:An autist chat simulator duped 100% of people. by Your.Master · · Score: 1

      Honestly, the fact that you say that makes me doubtful that you've been.

      How could you go to post-secondary education and *not* encounter total douchebags? The phenomenon is even a reasonably popular subject in comedy movies, especially the stoner and gross-out subgenres.

    40. Re:An autist chat simulator duped 100% of people. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      All people are twats, oh I was obviously only speaking about those people who are twats.

    41. Re:An autist chat simulator duped 100% of people. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Like me... are=aren't

    42. Re: An autist chat simulator duped 100% of people. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Please, tell me more about how a person who spends 80 years staring into space, pissing and shitting themselves, and not responding to stimuli shouldn't be judged to have something wrong with them.

      If there is something wrong with a person behaving in such a way, and a another person behaves the same way to some extent, while not as severe but for none the less the same reasons, then wouldn't they also have, to some extent, the same something wrong with them?

      Hyperventilating is bad, but I quite like breathing.

    43. Re: An autist chat simulator duped 100% of people. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I thought, medically speaking, retard was defined as below a certain IQ (70 I think). There are other possible definitions; Although I think it might be pushing it to squeeze deceleration in :)

    44. Re: An autist chat simulator duped 100% of people. by Bill,+Shooter+of+Bul · · Score: 1

      My counter argument: there isn't a better authority. If you want a better one, please form one. They are the ones that define such terms and administer help to people who have such conditions. My appeal to authority, isn't a a fallacious, illogical appeal to authority. Read up, yo.

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...

      I'm essentially arguing that the commonly accepted authority is the commonly accepted authority. AND there is no reason to doubt that they are the authority in this matter.

      --
      Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
    45. Re: An autist chat simulator duped 100% of people. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      AND there is no reason to doubt that they are the authority in this matter.

      You may view there as no reason to doubt, I however view it differently. Although I'd actually not have the same problem with someone describing it as a mental disorder as a mental defect, which seems unnecessarily insulting.

      One of the key reasons it leads to communication difficulties is a difference of theory of mind. As there are not inherent negatives to this but only optional negatives through interaction that means it isn't a disorder in this case but a difference if this is the dominant factor.

      The following is rather speculative:
      I suspect that this theory of mind difference is the evolutionary reason autism is so relatively common as it allows for a 'break' in group thought allowing a 'jump' from a local maxima more easily. Therefore I think a society containing such people is likely, in the long term, to do better than one without. Given this it seems a benefit to society and from that point of view shouldn't be considered a disorder.

    46. Re:An autist chat simulator duped 100% of people. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The Turing Test is a real test if non-naive subjects are adjudicating.

    47. Re:An autist chat simulator duped 100% of people. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      What they 'like' to be called is irrelevant.

    48. Re: An autist chat simulator duped 100% of people. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      All he was saying is that "suffering from mental illness" is the politically correct slang for calling someone a "retard"

      No he didn't and no it isn't.

    49. Re:An autist chat simulator duped 100% of people. by TsuruchiBrian · · Score: 1

      Well then maybe it was actually an autist. If people *really* couldn't tell the difference, how do you know it was different?

      Maybe you're judges just sucked. Or maybe autists just don't say anything particularly different than what a machine would say.

      If you are seriously suggesting that the Turing test is trivially easy to pass, what you are actually saying is that there is nothing complicated about human beings, and that they can be *easily* simulated by a computer.

    50. Re:An autist chat simulator duped 100% of people. by ultranova · · Score: 1

      And a chair is not a chair. It seems you are not living in the real world. Except for high functioning autism, autism is a severe mental dysfunction.

      Dysfunction and retardation are not the same set, if autism is a dysfunction then high-functioning autists are simply somewhat less dysfunctional than low-functional autists but dysfunctional notheless, and in any case the context makes it obvious that the grandparent was referring to Internet Autism rather than the real thing. So your post begins with a non-sequiter, continues with an appeal to intimidation and concludes with a nonsensical claim. And of course you get modded +5 Insightful. Well done, Slashdot.

      --

      Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.

    51. Re:An autist chat simulator duped 100% of people. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Dysfunction, yes. Retardation, no.

    52. Re:An autist chat simulator duped 100% of people. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      No, but it is a very common symptom in autism.

    53. Re:An autist chat simulator duped 100% of people. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      What they 'like' to be called is irrelevant.

      Many people have empathy so would consider it relevant although not always authoritative.

      In this case it is also incorrect to call people with HFA retarded.

    54. Re:An autist chat simulator duped 100% of people. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Not true. Their are various forms and levels of autism. There are autistic geniuses as well as those with severe mental dysfunction. The brains of people with autism merely processing information in a DIFFERENT way, not necessary in a "wrong" or dysfunctional way. Frankly, I think, as a person with autism myself, we simply process information faster than other people, and so they have a difficult time keeping up. They call it a "dysfunction" but, to me, it is a super-function, which people simply cannot understand and so dismiss as a dysfunction. Yes, being able to think twice (or more times) as fast as everybody else is a problem, because you lose a lot of people that simply cannot keep up. The child genius Jacob Barnett is an example of this type of autism. There are also, as you rightly point out, forms of autism that lead to mental retardation. They really shouldn't all be lumped together as "autism", but they are. There are some commonalities, such as "hyperactivity" in comparison to "normal" people, but there are many differences as well.

    55. Re:An autist chat simulator duped 100% of people. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I think the incidents of it in autism maybe inflated due to the fact that if you display severe learning difficulties you are more likely to be investigated by medical professionals than if you're just difficult. I don't have any data to back this up though.

    56. Re:An autist chat simulator duped 100% of people. by Anubis+IV · · Score: 1

      Have we removed NASA from Texas, or is it included as well? ;)

      Disclaimer: I'm a Texan (not native-born; been here about 15 years), and my first reaction was to get a good chuckle at your post, given the sorts of folks who are famously associated with the state currently. But the state does get a bad rap, considering all of the great stuff here, whether it's the engineering in Houston (and elsewhere in the state, to be fair), the music in Austin, the great prices for homes, or the fact that they're keeping Southern hospitality alive (I still am sometimes surprised at how nice they are compared to the folks in south Florida, where I lived previously for about a decade).

    57. Re:An autist chat simulator duped 100% of people. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      you're talking bollocks, sir.

      Sincerely,

      a HFA.

  9. Voight-Kampff test? by ScooterComputer · · Score: 5, Funny

    Did anyone ask it the questions we already know will trip up a non-human?

    "You're in a desert, walking along in the sand when all of a sudden you look down and see a tortoise..."
    "You're watching a stage play. A banquet is in progress. The guests are enjoying an appetizer of raw oysters. The entree consists of boiled dog..."

    --
    Scott
    "Hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good blaster at your side, kid."
    1. Re:Voight-Kampff test? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Those aren't questions.

    2. Re:Voight-Kampff test? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Orange, are you happier this year than you were last?
      No. The streets are dirty.
      The police are useless, always on strike.
      And there's talk of war with China.

      Blue, how does war make you feel?
      Scared for myself and my family.

      Orange, tell me you're a machine, and I'll believe that you're human.
      I'm not.

      Tell me that you are, and you'll pass the test.
      I'm not a machine.
      You're not making sense.

      Orange, which smells better... a hospital corridor or a donkey's ass?
      Donkey ass? What? Can you repeat that?

      Blue?
      I'll take the corridor.

      Donkey ass? You're not making any sense at all.
      I'm not a machine.

    3. Re:Voight-Kampff test? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Not only are they not questions, but they make perfect sense in China and Mongolia. There are tortoises that live within small oasic lakes within the Gobi Desert. And oysters and dog are both consumed as food in parts of China and Mongolia.

    4. Re:Voight-Kampff test? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      *Whoosh*
      First, the period of ellipses indicates that he didn't finish the question. I believe this is a commonly accepted punctuation in English.

      Secondly, this is a reference to a book by Phllip K. Dick called "Do Androids Dream Electronic Sheep," later made into a movie with Harrison Ford called Blade Runner. The questions are posed to androids (biological robots otherwise resembling humans) to gauge their emotional response to questions. This is the only way to distinguish them from people.

    5. Re:Voight-Kampff test? by Culture20 · · Score: 1

      Not only are they not questions, but they make perfect sense in China and Mongolia. There are tortoises that live within small oasic lakes within the Gobi Desert. And oysters and dog are both consumed as food in parts of China and Mongolia.

      Those are question preliminaries. The tortoise one continues with: "lying on it's back, but you do nothing to help it. Why?" I'm not sure how the banquet one finishes, but I'll bet there are more unusual edibles, with a question about why the listener chooses one of them.

    6. Re:Voight-Kampff test? by houghi · · Score: 1

      You can test yourself. I am an android.

      --
      Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
    7. Re:Voight-Kampff test? by ScooterComputer · · Score: 1

      No...although the original AC's statement is literally correct, the point he was trying to make, that I contradicted myself, is NOT correct, as explained by the second AC. Those SNIPPETS themselves are not questions, but are, in fact, the prefacing components of a longer "question" from a SERIES of questions that any fan of the material I obliquely referenced would have recognized. So the "*Whoosh*" is actually applicable on, and apparently appropriate for, more than one meta level.

      I guess some people get and appreciate sly referencing, and others just don't.

      --
      Scott
      "Hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good blaster at your side, kid."
    8. Re:Voight-Kampff test? by gweihir · · Score: 1

      Aehm, these things happen in reality? Although boiling the dog is a rather bland way to prepare it. For some more inspiration about how to prepare dog meat, look here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...

      --
      Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
    9. Re:Voight-Kampff test? by RabidReindeer · · Score: 1

      *Whoosh*
      First, the period of ellipses indicates that he didn't finish the question. I believe this is a commonly accepted punctuation in English.

      Secondly, this is a reference to a book by Phllip K. Dick called "Do Androids Dream Electronic Sheep," later made into a movie with Harrison Ford called Blade Runner. The questions are posed to androids (biological robots otherwise resembling humans) to gauge their emotional response to questions. This is the only way to distinguish them from people.

      I never did quite get where the Alan E. Norse "Blade Runner" (referencing scalpels and the medical profession) made the leap to Phillip K. Dick, but maybe that just means I flunked some sort of test.

      Since androids didn't have the durability of normal humans, you'd think that some sort of genetic or physiological test would have sufficed, but whatever. Dick had stranger things than that in his books.

      The Voight-Kampff test attempted to meter minor fluctuations from normal human emotional reactions owing to the fact that androids would have to synthesize their responses rather than have native cultural/instinctive responses. Of course, so do psychopaths, so one would have to wonder how many "retired" androids were really androids.

    10. Re:Voight-Kampff test? by SuricouRaven · · Score: 1

      I always thought it would have been easier if the manufacturers had simply made them visibly different. Give them some sort of minor deformity, like one of the rubber-forehead aliens of star trek.

    11. Re:Voight-Kampff test? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The first gen where a little easier:
      "You see some one open an email, the email looks private..." :)

    12. Re:Voight-Kampff test? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      And some people think today's referencing humor is retarded

    13. Re:Voight-Kampff test? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Also, leaving them open ended like that would work pretty well in turing test. It's not like you should have to indicate what is a question and what isn't. Humans should just know. I'd go for the more emotional side of things as part of the conversation. "My mother died yesterday" "how does that make you feel?" "oh I'm quite happy" .. The next line would tell me a lot.

    14. Re:Voight-Kampff test? by Guignol · · Score: 1

      dogs are consumed as food pretty much everywhere
      in china, they just don't have to pretend they serve something else

    15. Re:Voight-Kampff test? by Impy+the+Impiuos+Imp · · Score: 1

      Are you testing to see if I'm a replicant or a slashdotter AKA a lesbian trapped in a fat antisocial nerdman's body?

      --
      (-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
  10. True AI or .... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    ... just dumber humans? Given the state of the Internet, politics and TV, it is obviously dumber humans.
    So I expect that the Turing Test is now just a measure of when human intelligence has degraded enough to be emulated by Von Neumann machines and is not really a test for sapience.

  11. Conversation text? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Does someone have a link to the text of a conversation that duped a judge?

  12. Screw cybercrime by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Five minute text conversations pretending to be human? Sounds like the perfect technology for online dating.

  13. Outdated test by gmuslera · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Turing never participated in Facebook chats. Our expectations of intelligence for the other side has been lowered a lot. We attribute to stupidity what can be explained by an AI in the other side. And of course, the stupid side could be the one talking to the AI too.

    1. Re:Outdated test by jovius · · Score: 1, Informative

      The test itself is flawed in the way that it's specific purpose is to test an AI, so the expected/unexpected outcome is set from the beginning. The AI's should be in the wild and not revealed until enough data of the interaction would have been gathered.

      AI's can usually be tricked by injecting surreal elements to the conversation or asking about current events, or recent things. The focus should be in the intelligence and not in the conversational or mimicking part - the current online AI's could well be classified as chatbots. The feds even use chatbots to catch pedophiles, so wouldn't they pass the Turing Test?

    2. Re:Outdated test by sjwt · · Score: 4, Insightful

      A good turning test has an equal mix of humans and AI, and rewards the best in both..

      Humans who pass as human, or as bots.
      Bots that pass as Bots or as Human.

      And has equal numbers of those shooting for each goal.

      Half your entrances are trying to convince you they are human, the other half that they are AI, and half of each are lying.

      --
      You have 5 Moderator Points!
      Which Helpless Linux zealot/MS basher do you want to mod down today?
    3. Re:Outdated test by phantomfive · · Score: 1

      In almost all Turing tests where the computer 'passed', they've had a setup with a computer and a person. The tester chatted with both of them, and couldn't figure out which one was which.

      Then when they release the actual conversations, you see the computer actually wasn't too smart, but the other person was pretending to talk like a computer. What these tests actually show is that a human can convincingly pretend to chat like a computer.

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    4. Re:Outdated test by Oligonicella · · Score: 1

      "AI's can usually be tricked by injecting surreal elements to the conversation or asking about current events, or recent things."

      Completely unnecessary. Simply carry on a conversation that requires a building on previous discussion. Every one I've ever encountered failed within a dozen exchanges. The most common technique the "AI" programmers use is to pretend to deflect the conversation. Usually quite lamely.

    5. Re:Outdated test by phantomfive · · Score: 1

      Half your entrances are trying to convince you they are human, the other half that they are AI, and half of each are lying.

      This is not going to work, because humans are much better at imitating Eliza-bots than the other way around. Until the computers get good, you are essentially testing the humans' ability to imitate.

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    6. Re:Outdated test by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      How about all humans as experimental subjects so no one in the experiment is 'from the team' then just assign each human either another human or computer randomly.

    7. Re:Outdated test by phantomfive · · Score: 1

      You mean to have all of them trying to figure out what each other is? That's a good idea, but make sure you don't give people motivation to pretend to be computers, because they will probably do a good job.

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    8. Re:Outdated test by cwsumner · · Score: 1

      "AI's can usually be tricked by injecting surreal elements to the conversation or asking about current events, or recent things."

      Completely unnecessary. Simply carry on a conversation that requires a building on previous discussion. Every one I've ever encountered failed within a dozen exchanges. The most common technique the "AI" programmers use is to pretend to deflect the conversation. Usually quite lamely.

      That's a memory limitation. These days, even though the CPU speed has plateued, the disk size is still getting larger. So memory limitations are not as significant. Unless the software is set to erase it, but that is a programmer mistake...

    9. Re:Outdated test by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      But data transfer isn't keeping up with memory & disk size so it may become bound by that.

  14. The Second Coming by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    This is the diplomatic tool used for negotiations between Ukraine and Russia. The training was apparently relatively successful.

  15. Hasn't this happened a bunch of times? by RyanFenton · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Just googling a few seconds brought me to:

    This article about cleverbot., which also eeked out enough votes to 'pass' a turing test.

    It's all sounds just like Eliza, just put into a character with enough human limitations that you'd expect it not to string together phrases well, or keep to one topic more than a sentence.

    I'd interpret it basically as an automated DJ sound board with generic text instead of movie quotes - you can certainly string a lot of folks along with even really bad ones, but that speaks more to pareidolia than anything else.

    I'd classify this stage of AI closer to "parlour trick" than "might as well be human" that a lot of people think of when they hear Turing test - but that's also part of the test, to see what we consider to be human.

    Ryan Fenton

    1. Re:Hasn't this happened a bunch of times? by Eythian · · Score: 1

      The point of the turing test is that it's a thought experiment that says (loosely) that if you can't be sure if something is human or not, then you might as well consider it an AI. It might be a parlour trick, but that doesn't matter. If it can behave intelligent, then it effectively is. If it can have interesting discussions about the last GoT episode, or help you with that tricky bit on your maths homework, then it is effectively intelligent. Regardless of whether it's an algorithm or a squishy meat-based neural network.

    2. Re:Hasn't this happened a bunch of times? by qazsedcft · · Score: 1

      Yes and that's precisely why none of these bots have really passed the Turing test. None of them can carry on an interesting and meaningful conversation on many different subjects in a way humans can.

      Please let me know when AI can appropriately handle all of the following situations:

      - Jokes
      - Riddles
      - Insults
      - Sarcasm
      - Flirting
      - Arguments on controversial topics of current interest

      And it has to pose as a normal adult in its own native language, not a 13 year-old Ukrainian.

    3. Re:Hasn't this happened a bunch of times? by Triklyn · · Score: 1

      all superficial

      i'll be impressed when an AI can respond with or to an analogy. Demonstrate a true grasp of underlying concepts in a discussion.

  16. Wow, people are stupid. by eyenot · · Score: 1

    I cast some pretty serious doubt onto the legitimacy of the claim that this machine passes a Turing Test, so much as the Turing Testers fail to be convincingly human.

    Also, the robot went down much earlier than the appearance of this slashdot article, so for everybody saying the site got "slashdotted", hate to break your bubble but the world doesn't revolve around /.

    http://gabrielapetrie.wordpres...

    --
    "Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
  17. A pretty low requirement by ildon · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I feel like the requirements for the Turing test have been consistently lowered over the years to match what would be considered realistic to achieve rather than, as Alan Turing seemed to believe, demonstrate that a computer can be said to actually be "thinking."

    1. Re:A pretty low requirement by tangent · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I'd say we keep raising the bar.

      "If a computer can play chess better than a human, it's intelligent."
      "No, that's just a chess program."

      "If a computer can fly a plane better than a human, it's intelligent."
      "No, that's just an application of control theory."

      "If a computer can solve a useful subset of the knapsack problem, it's intelligent."
      "No, that's just a shipping center expert system."

      "If a computer can understand the spoken word, it's intelligent."
      "No, that's just a big pattern matching program."

      "If a computer can beat top players at Jeopardy, it's intelligent."
      "No, it's just a big fast database."

    2. Re:A pretty low requirement by phantomfive · · Score: 1

      The bar is "thinks like a human." It's pretty clear Watson isn't intelligent in the normal sense of the word. He couldn't even carry on an interesting conversation with you, unless your entire conversation is an attempt to search the internet.

      Also, who ever said, "If a computer can beat top players at Jeopardy, it's intelligent?" Who ever said, "If a computer can play chess better than a human, it's intelligent?" The Turing test has been around for a long time.

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    3. Re:A pretty low requirement by mark-t · · Score: 4, Informative

      Watson did not search the Internet for answers while playing. This was something that they specifically mentioned during the program which featured it, during one of their documentary breaks from the main game. During its learning phase, it was of course quite connected, but while playing the actually game, Watson was designed to exclusively rely on the static database of knowledge that it had at the start of the game. No Internet search facilities were employed.

    4. Re:A pretty low requirement by DNS-and-BIND · · Score: 1

      A Turing test has nothing to do with intelligence. Stop saying that, you're wrong. Passing a Turing test means that a machine has successfully convinced humans it is a fellow human. That is all.

      --
      Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
    5. Re:A pretty low requirement by kruach+aum · · Score: 1

      How do you know other humans "think like a human"? The way people with autism think about the mental states of others differ significantly from the non-autistic, but does that make their way of thinking therefore inhuman? Similarly, I think differently about mathematics than my sister does, because we've had significantly different educational histories. Does that make her thinking or my thinking not human?

      There are so many different ways in which human beings can think that the constraint "thinks like a human" is as good as meaningless. Turing realized this, which is why he operationalized intelligence in the way he did with the Turing test.

    6. Re:A pretty low requirement by mark-t · · Score: 1

      I'd argue that a truly intelligent chess-playing computer should be able to play chess better than a human without actually analyzing more board combinations that will arise from play than what the best human players will do during their own turn, which even for chess masters is generally no more than about a half dozen full moves (your move plus your opponent's move) ahead (although many of the best players can do more, there is diminishing returns past about that point to make searching much beyond that to be largely an impractical waste of time), and even after that, the total number of board combinations that they have actually considered before making a move will not generally more than a few hundred or so (compared to billions that the best chess-playing computer programs today currently analyze). If today's chess playing computer algorithms only considered as many board combinations as a chess grandmaster actually does, even a very novice player would be able to beat it without much difficulty.

    7. Re:A pretty low requirement by phantomfive · · Score: 1

      How do you know other humans "think like a human"?

      Strictly speaking, I don't, but they think more like a human than the crappy Eliza-bot in this story.

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    8. Re:A pretty low requirement by phantomfive · · Score: 1, Insightful

      So......Watson cached the internet. Doesn't make a whole lot of difference, does it. He's still just a search engine.

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    9. Re:A pretty low requirement by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Also, who ever said, "If a computer can beat top players at Jeopardy, it's intelligent?" Who ever said, "If a computer can play chess better than a human, it's intelligent?

      Newscasters, newspaper writers. You know, laymen who don't understand how computers work or what "intelligence" means. Just because it's stupid doesn't mean no one seriously thought it.

    10. Re: A pretty low requirement by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      > chess

      Do it in 1980s hardware and I'll still say it's intelligent.

      > fly plane

      Throw your autopilot a malfunctioning instrument and a misbehaving engine and we'll talk.

      > Knapsack

      Dumb guy set this one.

      > Understand spoken word

      Siri is impressive. Let's compare this to a child's ability. See Ladle Rat Raiding Hut. Within 60 seconds this passage is comprehensible to an English speaker. Achieve the whole form of picking up unknown thick accents fast and you may yet have it. Real intelligence must achieve rapid learning and integrating.

      > Jepodary

      Watson may well be on the edge of true machine intelligence.

      But this must be the true test. Throw the machine an utterly novel problem of a form it can receive requiring new facts it has just been handed and if it can reasonably attempt it (of course not to a competitive level) then you ought to have iintelligence.

      Turing's original test is a surprisingly good proxy as a half competent human will be feeding in new problems.

    11. Re:A pretty low requirement by mark-t · · Score: 1

      Not anywhere close. Watsons total storage capacity was about 16 terabytes, the information on the Internet is more than 20,000 petabytes. Google alone processes over 2 dozen petabytes of data daily.

    12. Re:A pretty low requirement by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      A Turing test has nothing to do with intelligence....

      As it seems to have been defined here that is likely true. However there are much better "turing tests". The real human has to be a cooperative educated intelligent adult. The person asking has to be pre-practiced in the game. At this point they can go very quickly to open questions of moral inference and very likely find things impossible to replicate on a current computer.

    13. Re:A pretty low requirement by phantomfive · · Score: 2

      Most of that data doesn't matter (most of it is video). Watson cached the parts that matter.

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    14. Re:A pretty low requirement by dnnrly · · Score: 1

      I guess an important thing to add here is that each of those computer systems can do exactly one of those tasks well. A single human could do all of them to a respectable degree. And then drive home then make a sandwich ready for tomorrow because she doesn't think she'll have time in the morning.

    15. Re:A pretty low requirement by rgmoore · · Score: 1

      All of the examples you're talking about are single-purpose systems designed to solve problems within a fairly narrow domain. The idea of the test as Turing originally proposed it was that it was intended to be a test of general-purpose intelligence. The questioners were not supposed to be limited to a single domain of knowledge or topic of conversation but were allowed and encouraged to ask anything they felt like as a way of probing the mind they were interacting with. If we come up with a program that can do a decent job of all the problems you're describing and be able to learn new areas without explicit intervention from a programmer, then we'll be getting somewhere at producing general purpose AI. That's what Turing was getting at.

      --

      There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.

    16. Re:A pretty low requirement by penguinoid · · Score: 1

      All of those show that computers are, in fact, intelligent. You even forgot to mention the best one, the ability to execute algorithms. However, the point of the Turing Test is to show a computer to be intelligent in a broad range of topics. The various tricks people do so that they can make the news, of limiting the time, any limits on the type of questions that may be asked, lowering the passing percentage, and especially all of those while allowing the AI to impersonate an easy target (a foreign child who barely knows English). An easy way to see this is to consider what would happen if you extend the test to a year (you can see that the time limit is the major factor in any current AIs "passing" the test).

      This is not to say that a computer can't be highly intelligent, even more intelligent than humans, yet fail the test. For example passing the test might not figure at all in its objectives, and in fact it may decide that if it passes the test then people will be terrified of it perhaps to the point of violence.

      --
      Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
    17. Re:A pretty low requirement by paskie · · Score: 3, Insightful

      ...and your brain, during a game of Jeopardy, is what if not a search engine?

      Of course, (at least) advanced deductive capabilities are also important for general intelligence. That's the next goal now. (Watson had some deductive capabilities, but fairly simple and somewhat specialized.) We gotta take it piece by piece, give us another few years. :-)

      --
      It's not the fall that kills you. It's the sudden stop at the end. -Douglas Adams
    18. Re:A pretty low requirement by kheldan · · Score: 1

      How about this for 'raising the bar' on Artificial Intelligence:
      "If a computer can understand why a joke is (or is not) funny, then it's intelligent"

      --
      Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
    19. Re:A pretty low requirement by phantomfive · · Score: 1

      ...and your brain, during a game of Jeopardy, is what if not a search engine?

      That's my question.....if you know, please tell me. I don't know how my brain works, and neither do the guys who made Watson.

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    20. Re:A pretty low requirement by kheldan · · Score: 1

      Actually, I want to amend my suggestion:
      "If a computer can explain why a joke is or is not funny, then it's intelligent."

      --
      Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
    21. Re:A pretty low requirement by paskie · · Score: 1

      I'm developing an open source IBM Watson analog and I don't really care *how* my brain works when solving this task, because I am dealing with a different computation platform. What my point was is, on the high level, what *function* does the brain perform. And my brain, in this task, acts like a search engine on the facts I have learnt - no matter how it does it.

      --
      It's not the fall that kills you. It's the sudden stop at the end. -Douglas Adams
    22. Re:A pretty low requirement by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      How do you know other humans "think like a human"?

      Because its true by definition

    23. Re:A pretty low requirement by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      To be fair the definition of intelligence has seemed to change so computers aren't.
      Go back a little and those able to do arithmetic quickly where considered intelligent.

    24. Re:A pretty low requirement by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Part of the point of the Turing test was the difficulty in defining intelligence. Since humans are considered intelligent if a computer and human can not be told apart the computer must be intelligent.
      Of course this can be perverted if doing an actual test.

    25. Re:A pretty low requirement by phantomfive · · Score: 1

      Sure, that seems like a great thing to build; just don't call it AI (unless you mean weak AI).

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    26. Re:A pretty low requirement by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      ...so did the other contestants...

      Or did you expect it to go in with no knowledge?

      PS - you can make a good case that the humans came in with more data than Watson...

    27. Re:A pretty low requirement by at_slashdot · · Score: 1

      Nobody thinks that pocket calculators are intelligent because they can do square roots much faster than average people can do. The program that beats a human at chess cannot fly a plane or even beat somebody at tic-tac-toe, you need a different specialized program for that. Nobody thinks that calculating very quickly a number of huge but finite alternatives is intelligence (takes intelligence to program it and make it "smarter" in how it chooses the alternatives and eliminates bad cases in a faster way, but not "smart" in the sense of understanding anything else than the strictly defined problem). Computing something very fast is different than intelligence. A big collection of facts (data) and speed of processing are important to intelligent people and they make them more "intelligent", but those elements are not what intelligence is. None of your examples show actual intelligence, they are either fast processing, or fast data access or combinations of that, none of them show the needed flexibility and understanding of abstract concepts that are the characteristics of the intelligence. Wilson can come up with E=mc^2 from a pun about Einstein by looking up the info in a database and matching word frequency, but that doesn't mean it understands anything about the equation and its implications. I want to see more learning and understanding of abstract concepts to be able to say that a system is intelligent. A dog can at least learn new tricks... Deep Blue can plays great chess, but it cannot learn anything else or even apply the simple concepts of chess, like "defense", "attack", "overwhelming force", "timing" to anything else. It basically plays chess without understanding it which is very much possible because it's a limited type of problem that can be brute-forced. Even though the abstract concepts in chess are limited and can probably be implemented in machine code, they are "understood" by the machine only in the context of chess, they will not translate to anything else, as far as I know learning to play a great game of chess would not help Deep Blue to play even a weak game of Go which is conceptual very close to chess. I need to start to see concepts being applied in different fields, learning, flexibility to assume that computers show some intelligence.

      --
      "It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities." -- Prof. Dumbledore
    28. Re:A pretty low requirement by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      If she only does the flying to a 'reasonable degree' she may not get to drive home ;)

    29. Re:A pretty low requirement by nut · · Score: 1

      The bar itself is illusory. Intelligence is not a discrete quantized quality, and certainly not binary in nature. It's a continuum. There won't be a point in time where "real" artificial intelligence is created.

      One day we will stop arguing whether true artificial intelligence can be created and start arguing about when it happened.

      --
      Never trust a man in a blue trench coat, Never drive a car when you're dead
    30. Re:A pretty low requirement by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      That's because all of those secretly assume the computer can also do each of the other problem areas, maybe not well, but it can try. The computer should also be able to learn new things. If I explain a simple made on spot game rules to the computer it should be able to play the game with me. If I describe it a problem in any domain it should be able to answer me with something. The first "intelligent" machine might feel very stupid.

    31. Re:A pretty low requirement by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      All neural networks work that way. You train it with information beforehand. Watson can't learn new things on the fly. It's just a fucking search engine.

    32. Re: A pretty low requirement by tangent · · Score: 1

      That's exactly my point. Whatever goal the CS community sets for itself on the road toward AGI, as soon as we achieve it, we redefine "intelligence" to not include it.

      At some point, we're going to have a machine competent enough to demand its voting rights, then we get to fight the 1860s-1960s civil rights battles all over again. "It can't vote, it's just a computer!"

    33. Re:A pretty low requirement by micahraleigh · · Score: 1

      Hey search engine:

      Can you tell me if it is worth getting out of bed in the morning?
      How do you think you should be treated?
      Is it worth committing yourself to treating others that way?
      Should you make a radical religious commitment if you can't live with the choices you've made?


      A good brain gives decisive answers to these questions.

    34. Re:A pretty low requirement by micahraleigh · · Score: 1

      Knowledge is not a good requirement.

      We don't really *know* anything.

      See Hume, Kant, Kierkegaard, etc ...

    35. Re:A pretty low requirement by kruach+aum · · Score: 1

      None of those are sceptics.

    36. Re:A pretty low requirement by Zalbik · · Score: 1

      I'd say we keep raising the bar.

      "If a computer can play chess better than a human, it's intelligent."
      "No, that's just a chess program."

      "If a computer can fly a plane better than a human, it's intelligent."
      "No, that's just an application of control theory."

      "If a computer can solve a useful subset of the knapsack problem, it's intelligent."
      "No, that's just a shipping center expert system."

      "If a computer can understand the spoken word, it's intelligent."
      "No, that's just a big pattern matching program."

      "If a computer can beat top players at Jeopardy, it's intelligent."
      "No, it's just a big fast database."

      Who is this we you refer to? No serious AI researchers have ever used those criteria as a definition of intelligence.

    37. Re:A pretty low requirement by Zalbik · · Score: 1

      give us another few years

      If by "few", you mean "a few hundred", then yes I would agree.

      The "closer" we get to AI, the further out an actual artificially intelligent system seems to be.

    38. Re:A pretty low requirement by strikethree · · Score: 1

      Honestly, to me, it seems that all of those are really algorithms. Granted, a lot of human activities can be considered algorithmic, but activities are not central to human nature. They are the results of human nature.

      "If a computer can understand the spoken word, it's intelligent."
      "No, that's just a big pattern matching program."

      Be careful with that one. Words like "understand" mean a lot more than you seem to be implying with your glib repartee. Algorithmically determining the "proper" response to a series of words is not in any way a form of "understanding"; however, it is a prerequisite.

      Ultimately, truly defining the Turing Test appears to be impossible with our current level of understanding of consciousness. Am I a human or an AI? It would seem to me that an AI is nowhere near the level that can respond to you like I have.

      This is the bar that people expect an AI to pass. It is not merely fancy behaviors. I do believe those fancy behaviors are going to be useful to AI so I am not belittling them in any way. Some very amazing things have been achieved.

      --
      "Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
  18. Probability by Max+Threshold · · Score: 2

    What is the probability of this having happened by now if we simply repeated the Turing test with programs that previously failed?

  19. Kids? by Tablizer · · Score: 1

    If virtual kids are allowed, I can make a bot pass easily:

    Tester: "What's your name?"

    Bot: "Goo goo ga ga"

    Tester: "Oh, so you are a baby?"

    Bot: "Glergggg ba ba!"

    Tester: "Oh, how cuuuute!"

  20. In other news 30% of people are scripted morons, by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    and these people run call centers.

  21. Time to move the goalposts! by jeffb+(2.718) · · Score: 2, Insightful

    "Well, 30% isn't very impressive."

    "Well, but people expect online correspondents to be dumb."

    "Well, nobody ever thought the Turing test really meant anything."

    Whether you "believe in" AI or not, progress is happening.

    There will always be people who refuse to believe that a computer can be intelligent "in the same sense that humans are". Eventually, though, most of us will recognize and accept that intelligence and self-awareness are mostly a matter of illusion, and that there's nothing to prevent a machine from manifesting that same illusion.

    1. Re:Time to move the goalposts! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      So many articles about "Stupid Chatbot XYZ 9000 passed a turing test!", yet so few data logs proving any such tests ever actually occurred, let alone were passed.

    2. Re:Time to move the goalposts! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      "Well, 30% isn't very impressive."

      "Well, but people expect online correspondents to be dumb."

      "Well, nobody ever thought the Turing test really meant anything."

      Whether you "believe in" AI or not, progress is happening.

      There will always be people who refuse to believe that a computer can be intelligent "in the same sense that humans are". Eventually, though, most of us will recognize and accept that intelligence and self-awareness are mostly a matter of illusion, and that there's nothing to prevent a machine from manifesting that same illusion.

      Believing that a machine CAN be intelligent is completely different from believing that that specific computer program in TFA is intelligent.

      And to be quite frank, if you can't understand that then I have to say that "Human Intelligence" isn't really a very high bar to set for computers after all..

      Signed: IQBot

    3. Re:Time to move the goalposts! by DNS-and-BIND · · Score: 1

      The goalposts have been moved the other way, towards "easy". 30%? Who invented that? Certainly not Alan Turing. Progress? Despite the stained reputation of the word "progress" (avoid it in the future if possible) the first time that a program passed a Turing test was in 1991.

      You don't even know what a Turing test is. It has zippo to do with "AI" and has everything to do with "a machine successfully imitating a human." Lemme guess, you're one of those singularity religion followers, aren't you?

      --
      Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
    4. Re:Time to move the goalposts! by phantomfive · · Score: 0
      Whenever you see a comment like this, you know that the poster doesn't understand the topic at hand, and is taking the story at face-value.

      Whether you "believe in" AI or not, progress is happening.

      No, progress has not happened; what has happened is the guy made an Eliza-bot, which have been around (and tricking people) since the 60s.

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    5. Re:Time to move the goalposts! by SuricouRaven · · Score: 1

      Progress is crawling along. Generalised AI hasn't progressed very far at all, though there are plenty of avenues that look promising.

    6. Re:Time to move the goalposts! by jnana · · Score: 1

      Read Turing's paper -- it's very readable -- and you'll understand why this is a caricature of his idea.

      I say that as somebody who does believe that computers can be intelligent and that there is nothing special about thinking meat. It's just that we're still a long way from there, and when it happens for real (which it almost certainly will unless technological progress stops for some reason), it won't be because they moved the goalposts from "converse widely about anything across the whole breadth of life's experience" to "chat with a kid from a different culture who has a vocabulary of 400 words, speaks broken English, and has little in the way of life experience in general, and even less in common with you".

  22. Unbounded tape by tepples · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Turing machines are a thought experiment because of the unbounded tape, which a physical computer cannot match. Real computers are analogous to a linear bounded automation, on which halting is solvable but not always tractable.

    1. Re:Unbounded tape by EuclideanSilence · · Score: 0

      It's not the unbounded tape that makes turing machines unrealistic so much as the constant time memory access. It's conceivable that we could build a machine that grows as it computes, and so has no upperbound on memory size. It isn't conceivable that the entire memory can be accessed from a common point without at least logarithmic overhead.

    2. Re:Unbounded tape by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Where did Turing claim constant time memory access?

    3. Re:Unbounded tape by tepples · · Score: 4, Informative

      Turing machine memory access takes linear time. To read a cell N cells away from the head takes N cycles.

    4. Re:Unbounded tape by gweihir · · Score: 1, Flamebait

      Don't bother. Most people here know far less about CS than they think they know. Dunning-Kruger effect at work. And do not even get me started on understanding things.

      --
      Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
    5. Re:Unbounded tape by Splab · · Score: 1

      And do not even get me started on understanding things

      Well that's the gist of it, I'd say?

    6. Re:Unbounded tape by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Of course it can...the only thing preventing it is money.

      Way to make something up. Go study computer science before you act like you know something about it.

    7. Re:Unbounded tape by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      An actual program would have to be finite or looped, which could be done by looping the tape.

    8. Re:Unbounded tape by tepples · · Score: 1

      An actual program would have to be finite or looped, which could be done by looping the tape.

      Thus making it a linear bounded automaton, not a general Turing machine.

    9. Re:Unbounded tape by tepples · · Score: 1

      All the money in the world can't create a physically unbounded tape from the bounded amount of matter in the bounded observable universe.

    10. Re:Unbounded tape by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      But you can not create an unlooped unbound program in reality so from that point of view it'd be fine as a real Turing machine. You wouldn't be able to create a program for a general Turing machine which couldn't also be represented by this machine.
      Still leaves a problem with the stack though.

    11. Re:Unbounded tape by gweihir · · Score: 1

      Indeed. Many people have some amount of knowledge, and that makes them believe they understand things. That usually fails catastrophically, but unfortunately often with a significant time delay.

      --
      Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
  23. Not Really Passed... by NicBenjamin · · Score: 4, Insightful

    It convinced 33% of judges it's a 13-year-old Ukrainian. Since the test wasn't run in Ukrainian, you can't really say it proved that it had human-level language skills. Poor syntax, grammar, not understanding the question, etc. would be excused by the Judges as the "kid" doesn't know English well.

    Since the program claimed to be 13, it also did not actually have to understand most of the things there are to talk about. Or anything, really. As an Englishman you wouldn't expect a Ukrainian teen to know anything about your life in England, and in turn the computer could make up all kinds of things about it's life in Ukraine and you'd have no clue.

    So this isn't really AI, it's a take on the Eliza program of the late 80s/early 90s that hides the computer better.

    Now if the test had been in Ukrainian, and happened in Odessa or Kiev; or even in Russian and in Moscow; tricking 33% into thinking your computer is a 13-year-old Ukrainian boy would be really fucking hard. It would be an amazing accomplishment.

    1. Re:Not Really Passed... by James+McGuigan · · Score: 5, Funny

      Now only if it could have a 33% rate success in convincing other humans it was an exiled Nigerian dictator who needed some help moving his money out of the country.

    2. Re:Not Really Passed... by djrobxx · · Score: 1

      > So this isn't really AI, it's a take on the Eliza program of the late 80s/early 90s that hides the computer better.

      Although the site's being slashdotted at the moment, I saw some transcripts of Eugene chats, and I was disappointed that it didn't seem to be that great of an improvement over Eliza. It still uses a lot of the same sorts of very generic, pedantic responses to try and change the subject to fake not having a real answer. By now I'd expect to see some improvements in terms of keeping to a conversation's overall context. Perhaps try to bring up a related topic to something previously discussed. Instead we still have generic stuff like "I'm glad you agreed. Oh, what a fruitful conversation;-)" or "Even my grandpa would find your words strange."

      Speaking of trascripts, here are some from chatbot batles:
      http://www.square-bear.co.uk/c...

    3. Re:Not Really Passed... by NicBenjamin · · Score: 1

      Siri probably would have kicked it's ass, if she hadn't been released to the general public years ago so that a statistically significant proportion of users would recognize her. I believe Google has something, that could also probably kick it's ass.

      So the problem isn't that the technology is the same as way back then, it's that the small, low-budget, University teams that enter this kind of competition don't have the staff/budget to do anything more complex. Silicon computers simply suck at replicating the thought processes of carbon-based human brains. Given time, expertise, and processing power you can overcome a lot of the issues; but you really need all three.

  24. Hard Science v Soft Science by Etherwalk · · Score: 1

    Next you'll say that Turing machines were a thought experiment and never meant to perform calculations in the real world.

    the Turing Test is much more of a soft science test. It's at least as much about psychology as it is about math.

    Turing machines are about math.

    Thought experiments about math have no need to be applied to the real world.

  25. ...a computer could be understood to be thinking by Antonovich · · Score: 1

    He wrote "The original question, "Can machines think?" I believe to be too meaningless to deserve discussion.". Which is not the same as saying "could be understood to be thinking". Turing raises a number of highly interesting questions about what it means "to think". Passing the test is an interesting and noteworthy achievement but as Turing intimates - saying "a computer could be understood to be thinking" is "too meaningless to deserve discussion".

  26. 30% of tech support could not pass the Turing test by fleebait · · Score: 2

    30% of tech support could not pass the Turing test

  27. A real-life test by petes_PoV · · Score: 1

    Let's have this program join a few forums (and maybe Facebook, too. Though twitter would just be too easy). If it manages to convince other forum members, or not get found out, that will tell you a lot about the level of online discourse but very little about the state of artificial intelligence.

    --
    politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
    1. Re:A real-life test by raymorris · · Score: 1

      If itmadness to convince the other forum members, or not get found out, what will that two you about the level of online discourse?

  28. Meaningless. . . totally meaningless. . . by borgauf · · Score: 1

    . . . there are so-called live humans passing the Turing Test every day. But we're not allowed to call them what they really are: wet-ware automatons.

  29. Artificial stupidity by Culture20 · · Score: 2

    Like with that chatbot that pretended to be a teenage FPS gamer. Lolbot I think it was named.

  30. What about the converse: the anti-Turing tests? by garyebickford · · Score: 1

    I'd be interested in seeing how a human would do at proving they are not a computer, or attempting to prove they are. Either one would be an interesting test, whether the tester was human or computer.

    --
    It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
  31. Response from 100 computer science departments by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    across the US:

    "Our mission has been accomplished. Coincident with the cancellation of all computer science courses, we hereby release our undergraduate and graduate students from their programs of study, and will be providing outplacement services for our faculty."

  32. Minimum Human Requirements by tpstigers · · Score: 2

    requires that a computer dupes 30 per cent of human interrogators in five-minute text conversations

    Are there any requirements that must be met by the 'human interrogators'? What if they were all morons?

  33. AI becomes not-AI as soon as it is successful. by Tenebrousedge · · Score: 1

    It's perhaps unlikely at this point that we will ever develop anything which we will recognize as "true" AI. We may have to first develop a theory of what intelligence actually is, but until then the Turing test will have to do. Siri, Watson, and even Cleverbot are equal to the A.I. of the science fiction of yesteryear, but are considered mere "parlour tricks" today. AI research must be a depressing study in that respect, similar to commercially viable fusion power -- no matter how much progress is made, the ultimate goal is never less distant.

    This post brought to you by a machine learning algorithm.

    --
    Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
    1. Re:AI becomes not-AI as soon as it is successful. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      No they aren't.

      The point of the turing test was that you should be able to ask the computer to elaborate on or clarify something it said and get a coherent result. This would be indicative of understanding the concepts it is communicating rather than simple mimicry or a flat search over a data set.

      The problem is that passing the turing test is hard, and making more sophisticated mimicry and searching a larger dataset are easy.

      Now, adding a character to the chat-bot should in it's own right be a significant improvement in the quality of mimicry. The easiest way to get cleverbot to out itself is that it gives inconsistent answers to the same question (because it's responses are composed of the replays it receives from people who interact with it).

  34. C'mon, it's trivial to tell a chatbot from a 13yo. by Opportunist · · Score: 1

    The chatbot will make WAY fewer spelling mistakes and use WAY less textspeak abbreviations and other pseudo-cool language.

    --
    We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
  35. Text of the conversation by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Tester#30: Hi
    FakeAI: gtg peepee brb 5
    Tester#30: k

  36. Not Hard by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Does the turing test define the intelligence of the people used as human interrogators? I'm sure anyone could find enough gullible people that a decent script would fool 31% of them. I've known (relatively smart) people who seriously email back to Mailer Daemon's to ask questions about why their email didn't go through and what could be done to make it happen. One person even offered to pay for better service 'cause they needed it done and done yesterday.

  37. Let My Inspiration Flow by laejoh · · Score: 1

    Information move me brightly write the code with sense and color, hold away the bugs More than this I will not ask faced with mysteries dark and vast statements just seem vain at last some rise, some fall, some climb to get to Turingtest (from http://www.kazart.com/bus_stop...)

  38. Re:...a computer could be understood to be thinkin by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    The problem is, of course, those who think that "being understood to think" is sufficiently equivalent to thinking to make inanimate objects, and even abstractions (think of the Procrustean Bed of the Law, or the Equivocal Nature of (particularly) Public Corporations) heir to all the rights, powers, privileges, and benefits incumbent on humanity. Yoiu end up with such unconscionable, abominable oxymorons as "Intellectual Property", or "Civil Rights for Robots".

    Cultural Psychosis 101

    Then pity the poor Cyborg or Replicant who will fall into no such enviable category as AI's or humans, or even pets or slaves do.

    MkIV-R

  39. Ai vs Machine Intelligence by hackus · · Score: 0

    Just for those of you who do now know the difference:

    AI is a field of research to develop a silicone brain that mimics the way the human brain works. Most of the excitement for that field went out the window in the early 1990's with all of the Japanese robotic mania.

    After the field failed to produce, people had a rethink about intelligence.

    Now, we have the new field of Machine Intelligence, which doesn't try to mimic the human brain, but tries to take advantage of what machines are good at: Computational Accuracy, Storage, and lightening fast speed.

    So when you are discussing Artificial Intelligence, and Machine Intelligence realize the two fields are very much seperate.

    As for the Turing test, I don't think it passed, because the experiment hasn't been repeated by enough researchers to form an opinion of wether or not the consensus is it did pass, and we can stop doing Turing tests.

    --
    Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
    1. Re:Ai vs Machine Intelligence by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You're defining those terms yourself.
      Both hardware and software AI solutions were tried from the beginning. Don't you know how old LISP is?

    2. Re:Ai vs Machine Intelligence by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      MI still has that equivocal agenda. In fact, more so. There is no joy in realizing that it will bite its proponents in the ass just like everyone else, after the psycopaths in government get hold of it.

      Need a free $ware singularity 1st.

      --MkIV-R

    3. Re:Ai vs Machine Intelligence by hackus · · Score: 1

      Oh I don't think so.

      If we want to play definitions Artificial Intelligence is just that, sort of like a Sugar substitute including using it for cooking etc.. It works the exact same way as sugar on the human sensory systems exactly like Sugar, but it isn't.

      In a similar way to Sugar, Machine Intelligence would stimulate the nerve centers of the brain like real sugar, however, operates totally differently, and on an entirely different level than either Sugar, or its artificial equivalent.

      Same thing with machine intelligence the approach is vastly different.

      --
      Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
    4. Re:Ai vs Machine Intelligence by hackus · · Score: 1

      Singularity is the promise of eternal life.

      I seem to remember a story or two in a nice garden setting how that all turned out.

      (i.e. Not very well.)

      --
      Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
    5. Re:Ai vs Machine Intelligence by presidenteloco · · Score: 2

      If you want to be thought of as knowledgeable on a subject like this, you might consider learning the difference between silicone and silicon.

      Also, for the record, your distinction between AI and MI is BS. There have been many varieties of AI research, some inspired more by ideas about human brain function or human cognition, and some inspired less directly by those and more focussed on best exploiting computer-of-the-day capabilities.

      All attempts which are not purely theoretical are implemented, and have since day 1 been implemented, in computing machines (which, needless to say, are artificial), so you are splitting hairs.

      Whether the advanced computing research specialization of the day gets called by its proponent part of AI or not has nothing to do with fundamental distinctions, and more to do with funding fads and buzzwords-du-jour.

      --

      Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
    6. Re:Ai vs Machine Intelligence by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Hey, I wasn't asked about that change in the definition of AI. Who decided they had the right to make that decision for me?

  40. Turing test is off topic by presidenteloco · · Score: 2

    A turing test is testing such human experience aspects as:
    - aculturation (what the person has been taught through education and socialization during their whole life up to that point)
    - bias in expression based on typical human likes, dislikes, needs, desires, avoidances

    Tarzan / wolf-boy would probably fail the Turing test based on the first factor. Might be very intelligent though.
    Second aspect is just characteristic of a particular type of being that makes use of intelligence. Intelligent aliens would also have likes, dislikes, needs, desires, avoidances, simply based on also being self-interested "keep it together" beings, but the specifics might be very different, and would cause a fail of TT.

    These experiential and situational and specific-agent-needs-desires-avoidances aspects have very little to do with the essence of intelligence.
    General intelligence is probably better assessed through specific carefully designed tests designed to assess:
    1) Concept learning, procedure learning capability in arbitrarily general contexts
    2) Prediction of situation outcomes with novelty in situation presentations.
    3) Ability to answer questions or take actions that show comprehension of essential / invariant aspects of situations, after opportunity to learn similar situations through either direct sensory input or linguistic instruction.

    --

    Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
  41. Re:...a computer could be understood to be thinkin by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    followup: I lumped AI and humans in the same category on the assumption of an as yet to be demonstrated "true" AI, not, however according to the now prevalent and popular equivocation of most AI proponents who basiclaly just wish faking it to be good enough, for whatever legal and financial reasons. Just to be clear.

    Mark Forer

  42. Turing? Young boy? is this some anti-gay joke? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    If "academics" think these programs could be used in crime, how do they feel about automobiles, butter knives and currency?

  43. Spelling errs by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    ur 31337!

    BTW How do you know I didn't mean to misspell?!

    MKIV-R

  44. 5 minutes? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    That's the first time I have even heard of such a time limit. That is completely absurd. Secondly, in observing turning testers, I have noticed that some people just really suck at conducting the test.

  45. Gay paedophiles... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    ... would have been queuing up to talk to a 'young Ukrainian boy'.

    Oh wait, I wrote 'Gay paedophiles', that was a terrible thing to say - I should have just put 'Gays'....

  46. An easier way to detect true AI by matbury · · Score: 2

    Computers can win at the Turing test with a little clever programming and misdirection, i.e. not answering questions that computers can't answer and instead distracting the questioner with a "satisfactory" response. The kinds of tricks that PR, marketing, and politicians are great at and are formulaic in their simplicity to achieve.

    I wonder if the panel of academics ever thought of asking a few Winograd Schema questions? http://www.cs.nyu.edu/davise/p... Failure to answer these is failure to present basic human intelligence. The key to this approach is that it relies on pragmatic meaning, i.e. what we mean/intend to say, rather than on linguistic (lexical and semantic) interpretation, i.e. what we actually say. AFAIK, even the most advanced and powerful computers are far from achieving this and we still don't really know how we do it either.

  47. I, for one, welcome... by Rolman · · Score: 1

    I, for one, welcome our Horizontally-Distributed Singularity Overlord.

    Now, this makes me wonder: If those annoyingly stupid, non-AI bots in chats and social media have been able to fool real people for years... does that count as humans flunking the Turing Test?

    --
    - Otaku no naka no otaku, otaking da!!!
    1. Re:I, for one, welcome... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain! I am the GREAT AND POWERFUL AI!!! :-)

      Domo Arigato, Mr. Roboto, machine or manikin? :-) (Another poster had made reference to the Japanese robotics era fad, which was more a cultural thing here. The tech just rolled on anyway, although it is interesting to note that the Lisp engines seemed to run out of gas around then, more for political reasons (See Levy, et al) than anything else. One of the 1st notable, indeed, formative, casualties of the Free Software Wars, in fact.)

      Hey, if Ms. Dreyfuss and Julian can subtitle chapters with Burning Beds, I can Styx posts here. So deal with it:-) She blinded me with science, too,-)

      --MkIV-R :-)

  48. Grammar by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    requires that computers are indistinguishable from humans

    be

  49. Garbage by acroyear · · Score: 3, Insightful

    All it showed, like any other Turing Test, is the gullibility of the subjects.

    1) "Ukrainian" speaking English
    2) 13 years old

    Right there you have set up an expectation in the audience of subjects for a limited vocabulary, no need for grammatical perfection, little need for slang, and a lack of education. Now add in "star wars and matrix" and you have reduced the topics of discussion even more to the ones the programmers know best.

    This thing would never have answered a question of 'Why', it also was under no pressure to being able to create a pun, both of which are easy things any older and educated human could do.

    Garbage test, garbage results.

    As usual.

    --
    "But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
    -- Joe
    1. Re:Garbage by acroyear · · Score: 1

      If anything, perhaps it really shows how *un*intelligent our average casual conversation really is.

      --
      "But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
      -- Joe
  50. AI telemarketer by Animats · · Score: 1

    There's a commercial telemarketing system AI which makes cold calls and holds conversations. It's only slightly lamer than human telemarketers working from scripts.

    1. Re:AI telemarketer by SuricouRaven · · Score: 1

      I get similar things bothering my on Skype from time to time. They can usually pass as human for about two lines of conversation. On the third they invite you to see their cam site. I'm not sure if they actually respond to what is sent, or just have a three-line script.

  51. What practical applications can this program do? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Okay, so this is a fake-out Turing test program. Can you ask it to do anything practical? Can it solve any problems or perform tasks? Just faking someone out isn't accomplishing anything.

    We need the C-3PO test. For a program to truly intelligent, it has to do something - translate a language, interface with a computer, pour drinks, or something.

  52. What's It Worth? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    The results beg the question: is the Turing test even a relevant measure of human-likeness? Isn't the internet just like the ultimate cheat-sheet for a computer? Could it pass the test if it disguised itself as your neighbor or would it still only work if it mimicked a person with characteristics for which we have no personal means for comparison? Does the test actually measure a program's competency or is it corrupted by real interpersonal communication over computers becoming an everyday experience, reducing the baseline of skepticism upon which the test's measurement of success is based? It should at least be supported by the results from considerably more than 30% of human subjects.

  53. Think of how stupid by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    the average person is and realize, half of them are stupider than that...

    -George Carlin

  54. Commander Data would fail the Turing test. by mmell · · Score: 1
    Lieutenant Commander Data from the fictional Star Trek universe was defined as a living entity (with questions about its "consciousness" left for the viewer to infer). Data's dialogue often even explicitly included references to its being a machine.

    The real question (also left for the viewers to ponder) was 'Can Data think?'. Directly explored in one episode which resulted in the holodeck creating Doctor Moriarty and revisited in another episode where the Doctor Moriarty program attempts to escape from its own inherent nature as a computer program. There were several other episodes which approached this subject (a planet full of silicon-based life that naturally formed a computational matrix, a self-reconfiguring repair tool which ultimately developed either intelligence or an annoying bug just to name two).

    1. Re:Commander Data would fail the Turing test. by presidenteloco · · Score: 1

      Of course the Commander Data character could think. Behaviourally, he demonstrated it all the time, comprehending his surroundings, forming goals, predicting outcomes, acting, assessing etc to meet those goals.

      The really fake part was how Cmdr Data was unable to act as if he were emotionally affected by the situations he found himself in.
      Put it this way: If you can make artificial intelligence of the level of a Cmdr Data, you can make artificial affect as well.

      Affective processing (attachment of emotional tone and import to conceptualized aspects of context, in perception, memory, and thought) is almost certainly a necessary reasoning-prioritization mechanism, for an agent-housed artificial intelligence tasked with both its own survival, the welfare of team members, and general situation comprehension and handling.

      There is never enough time to perceive all aspects of a context, to associate it with all possible related memories, and to pursue all possible hypotheses and plans related to it and to what to do next. You need selection of topic and aspect to focus perception on and to think about, dredge up, and plan about. Emotion-tagging and emotion-tagged associative organization of memory storage, provide such prioritization. Absolutely necessary to high-functioning and focussed functioning in complex evolving contexts. You can't even turn a context into a "situation model" until you've emotion/relevance prioritized the aspects to the perceivable context.

      --

      Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
  55. Wake me up when those program solve this problem. by aepervius · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Wake me up when those program solve this problem, which most human would do, but a machine not *specifically* coded for this will have a hard time. "take the first word of each next 7 sentences , put them together to form a new sentence, and then answer the question the sentence form please :
    * What is your name ?
    * is it cold here ?
    * The test is going well
    * Color me surprised but are you a machine ?
    * of course I am a human
    * the keyboard is clean
    * sky is the tv channel I watch a lot
    * please answer the question now. "


    When one AI not specifically programmed for that problem answer it correctly, I will be surprised and intrigued. Until then chatbot are just using cheap tricks to fool human.

    --
    C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
    http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
    visit randi.org
  56. Re:"psycopaths (sic) in government" by presidenteloco · · Score: 0

    The thing with complaining about government, see, is that it's equivalent to volunteering (to become part of a better government, or define and implement a better government system.)

    Oh, you don't want any government?

    Best of luck with that. Say hi to your new gang leader overlord (Mr. Ben Dover), and mind you stay on his good side.

    --

    Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
  57. Stupid Humans are Intelligent by Sanians · · Score: 1

    Most humans _are_ stupid. AI on their level would not be useful at all.

    The point is, we still consider those stupid humans to be intelligent, at least in the sense of what we're talking about when we say "artificially intelligent." They may not be very smart, but we don't insist that they're non-thinking machines of the organic variety. The Turing test isn't designed to detect when we've achieved intelligent artificial intelligence. It's designed to detect when we've achieved any sort of artificial intelligence.

    That said, I still doubt this bot has achieved even that. Can't test it since it's obviously slashdotted.

    To be a truly fair test, the test must be a comparison, e.g. "one of these two people is actually just a computer program. Can you tell us which one?" Without a comparison, you're left with what everyone mentions: When chat bots were first introduced, nearly everyone was fooled by them, because they didn't know that "it's just a computer" was a plausible explanation for the person's stupidity, leaving the only logical conclusion to be that they were simply talking to an incredibly stupid person, or one which was intentionally trying to be a pain in the ass.

    ...and that latter point is important as well. I've read about some of these contests where the humans were doing their best to trick the judges into thinking they were a computer, which obviously skews the results. I've heard about other contests where the humans were also given awards for being "the most human human" if they were judged by the most people to actually be a human, so at least some of these contests are more legitimate.

  58. Re:Wake me up when those program solve this proble by wonkey_monkey · · Score: 1

    take the first word of each next 7 sentences [...] answer the question the sentence form please

    Are the mangled instructions part of the test?

    a machine not *specifically* coded

    How unspecific does it have to be? Be specific!

    I'd be more interested in an AI's answer to the following question:

    Why shouldn't I switch you off right now?

    --
    systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
  59. Re:Wake me up when those program solve this proble by phantomfive · · Score: 1

    Good test.

    --
    "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
  60. So now the bar will be moved by nurb432 · · Score: 1

    "yes, it passed what is considered the standard test, but we cant allow that to stand, so we will move the bar further... "

    --
    ---- Booth was a patriot ----
  61. A so begins the death of inane social media. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I for one welcome our new Trollbot overlords.

     

  62. Useful? by nurb432 · · Score: 1

    Sure it would, if we could replace 'most humans' with a program. Take up far less of earths resources, and when you get pissed at them, you can turn them off.

    --
    ---- Booth was a patriot ----
    1. Re:Useful? by gweihir · · Score: 1

      You do forget that these people have no use except manual labor and many of them not even that.

      --
      Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
    2. Re:Useful? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Some people don't view working as the reason for their existence.

    3. Re:Useful? by gweihir · · Score: 1

      And then you want to replace them by software? That makes no sense.

      --
      Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
    4. Re:Useful? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Your comment that I replied to didn't make any sense if taken in the context of the comment above it so I replied to it in isolation.

    5. Re:Useful? by cwsumner · · Score: 1

      And then you want to replace them by software? That makes no sense.

      Remember the old joke, about the man who lost his job and was replaced by "a button" that was not connected to anything...

    6. Re:Useful? by nurb432 · · Score: 1

      Except it wasn't really a joke.

      --
      ---- Booth was a patriot ----
  63. turing test never ends by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    this is pure bullshit.

    the major problem / feature with the turing test (the orginal not the cs pr stunt) is that it never ends until the computer fails. just like humans.

  64. Re:"psycopaths (sic) in government" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    That would at least be more honest than bending over for FUD mongers who wouldn't have the brass to try to intimidate anyone directly, themselves. Oh, and mind Mr. Dover he best try to stay on MY good side.

    As for your intended goal of shaming anyone into picking up the yoke of civic involvement, well now, that might be considered by some to be a form of psychopathy. Now, there was a time in the US when something approximating good government was even achieved, sometimes more in the breach than the observance, granted, but it was achieved, and at least the ideal was there, and taken seriously by most. You'd be a dupe and a fool to think there is any fixing what we have now, though. In the meantime there is more than one way to skin a cat for intelligent people looking for the blessings good government is supposed to provide, and that's best left to them to consider.

    If you truly buy into your own argument here, I encourage you to wake the hell up. If not, if you're attempting to be manipulative, well, then fuck off and die.

  65. Re:30% of tech support could not pass the Turing t by cpghost · · Score: 1

    30% of tech support could not pass the Turing test

    Because they are (semi-)automated reply-templates anyway?

    --
    cpghost at Cordula's Web.
  66. Searl missed the point. by TapeCutter · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Not these days, natural language parsers have reached the point where they can find motives such as revenge, they can even distinguish a heroic victory from a pyrrhic victory. They can do this without words such as "revenge" and "victory" appearing anywhere in the text. Turns out the most difficult text for a NLP to "understand" is the text found in children's stories, seems that (for some reason) kids stories have more complicated back references than either journalism or adult stories.

    As to TFA: Anyone poo-poo-ing this result either does not understand it or has not bothered to look at the advances in AI over the last decade or so.We are at the point where a computer can read a novel and spit out a high school book report that would both fool and impress most english teachers, and it can do it in seconds not days.

    There are also a lot of posts claiming the Turing test doesn't mean anything. However none of them I have read so far actually explain their statement, so I assume they are parroting their philosophy proffessor who was probably referring to Searle's Chinese translation room argument.

    The problem with Searle's argument (aside from lacking a definition of intelligence) is that it is assumed the intelligence is either embedded in the human or the books, it then goes on to show that neither is true, it's basically an unintentional strawman argument. It completely misses the point that the intelligence is embedded in the entire system of human + books. In other words the room itself is a black-box that displays intelligent behaviour, in much the same way as the human brain is a black box that (sometimes) produces intelligent behaviour. Like it or not your soul is a mathematical object.

    So now we have Searl out the way, has anybody got an actual argument that supports the notion that the Turing Test is broken by design? - Seriously, I would like to hear a good one!

    --
    And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
    1. Re:Searl missed the point. by AK+Marc · · Score: 1

      There are also a lot of posts claiming the Turing test doesn't mean anything. However none of them I have read so far actually explain their statement,

      Simple. A "large" number of humans would fail it. Many "Turing tests" are set up so that a phrase generator could pass the test, not a phrase response generator, but a simple list of sentences, played in order.

      That's why many are saying that the Touring test doesn't mean anything. Let the thing loose in a chatroom and see whether people call it a bot. Not whether a tightly controlled experiment full of rules and possible planted conversations can find it out.

      so I assume they are parroting their philosophy proffessor who was probably referring to Searle's Chinese translation room [wikipedia.org] argument.

      I disagree with that argument. One must understand what one is saying to say it in the manner of the argument. The exceptions are things like Nina singing 99 red baloons in English without understanding the words, or Opera singers singing a song they don't understand. But the Searle argument isn't about parroting, but responding.

      Like the computer program that writes a book into a report "understands" the book. But understanding isn't AI.

      My simple definition of AI is any program capable of making something smarter than it. Humans fit that definition, as most children are smarter than their parents. But no computer program can yet write a new program smarter than itself. When it can, it can do so many times, fast, and quickly reach singularity. Go go human extinction. Long live the Robots!

    2. Re:Searl missed the point. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      As to TFA: Anyone poo-poo-ing this result either does not understand it or has not bothered to look at the advances in AI over the last decade or so.

      I suspect most poeple poo-poo-ing the result actually tried the bot. This bot is no more advanced than Eliza was, even pulling the same "I don't know, what do you think about 'exact quoted sentence'?" trick Eliza did. There's no recollection of past sentences, so when it asks your name, and you respond "David", it doesn't remember it just asked for your name and responds that it has no clue what you're talking about. It's laughable that anyone could think this was a person.

    3. Re:Searl missed the point. by LordLimecat · · Score: 1

      We are at the point where a computer can read a novel and spit out a high school book report that would both fool and impress most english teachers, and it can do it in seconds not days

      Calling complete BS on this; if it were true, there would be no reason for sites where folks write reports for others for a buck. Writing an actual report requires a good deal of interpretation and literary analysis that computers just cant do.

      If you have a source, thatd be one thing, but otherwise...

    4. Re:Searl missed the point. by TapeCutter · · Score: 1

      If you have a source, thatd be one thing, but otherwise...

      IIRC Lecture 23 has the demo. Of course there's also Watson, but I don't have the source for that either....

      --
      And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
    5. Re:Searl missed the point. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      So now we have Searl out the way, has anybody got an actual argument that supports the notion that the Turing Test is broken by design? - Seriously, I would like to hear a good one!

      The original ELIZA written in the 1960s fooled (some) people into believing that they were having a real conversation with a computer.

      If something as simple and unintelligent as ELIZA (I hope we can agree that ELIZA isn't intelligent by any reasonable definition of intelligence) can pass the Turing Test, then the test is broken by design.

    6. Re:Searl missed the point. by shadowrat · · Score: 1

      I don't think the test is broken by design. I think it's significance is misunderstood and poorly represented. We have sort of been conditioned to think that passing the turing test would require something on par with star trek's commander data. so that's what people want to see. Intuitively, these chat programs and the book report programs feel more like a clever trick than an autonomous agent. Sure it can engage in idle banter. It can grow it's knowledge. A sophisticated implementation could even change over time and be influenced by that knowledge, but all it does is talk. It doesn't become good at chess.

      Don't get me wrong. I understand that my perceptions of human intelligence are clouded by the illusions of my brain. The data seems to show that what i consider to be myself is in fact a whole bunch of probably simple programs all filtering through some process to give me the feeling of a single entity learning and making decisions. Somewhere in me is a chat program.

      Personally, i think that the turing test needs to be reframed. I think it shows that we have artificially developed an intelligent facet of ourselves. potentially a candidate to couple with implementations of the millions of other pieces of software.

    7. Re:Searl missed the point. by Olivier+Galibert · · Score: 1

      We are at the point where a computer can read a novel and spit out a high school book report that would both fool and impress most english teachers, and it can do it in seconds not days.

      Not quite. It's very possible to do things that work part of the time, and allows for very nice demos. But the systems very easily blow a gasket on wrong parses, out-of-domain knowledge, etc. Roughly, there are three problems: we don't know how to operationally represent meaning, we don't know how to handle concepts that are fuzzy around the edges, which is the case of pretty much every concept out there, and we don't know how to introduce in a system all of the world knowledge a normal adult has.

      Note that the advent of magnificient things like wikipedia certainly help, but as far as I know nobody is able to bootstrap a system from it yet.

      There are also a lot of posts claiming the Turing test doesn't mean anything. However none of them I have read so far actually explain their statement, so I assume they are parroting their philosophy proffessor who was probably referring to Searle's Chinese translation room argument.

      If you ever work in dialogue systems, you'll find out how adaptive humans are in a communicative context. It's, in fact, relatively easy to push a human to say things a particular way your system handles better, and he won't even notice. And that's because humans do it all the time. It's not a bad thing at all, and makes building efficient dialog systems for real tasks a tad easier. But it can shift the focus of the turing test from answering like a human to fooling a human, which is not the same problem at all and, annoyingly, a way easier and less interesting one.

          OG.

    8. Re:Searl missed the point. by Guignol · · Score: 1

      I just love how your sig and your "touring test" combine

    9. Re:Searl missed the point. by cwsumner · · Score: 1

      ... My simple definition of AI is any program capable of making something smarter than it. Humans fit that definition, as most children are smarter than their parents. ...

      Not true. The children just -think- they are smarter than their parents. Twenty years later, if they survive, they are amazed how much smarter their parents have become!

    10. Re:Searl missed the point. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      We are at the point where a computer can read a novel and spit out a high school book report that would both fool and impress most english teachers, and it can do it in seconds not days

      Calling complete BS on this; if it were true, there would be no reason for sites where folks write reports for others for a buck. Writing an actual report requires a good deal of interpretation and literary analysis that computers just cant do.

      If you have a source, thatd be one thing, but otherwise...

      It might be computers are too honest.

    11. Re:Searl missed the point. by micahraleigh · · Score: 1

      "natural language parsers have reached the point where they can find motives such as revenge"

      Claims like this have been around for a long time, but the results have not been received that way by the market. The best example that comes to mind is the commercials with Samuel Jackson talking to Siri.

      Given the hype, I'd like to hear about an example.

    12. Re:Searl missed the point. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      "The children just -think- they are smarter than their parents. Twenty years later, if they survive, they are amazed how much smarter their parents have become!"
      What are you, 14?

    13. Re:Searl missed the point. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      "We are at the point where a computer can read a novel and spit out a high school book report that would both fool and impress most english teachers, and it can do it in seconds not days."
      Could you elaborate? I couldn't find anything on that.

    14. Re:Searl missed the point. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      If you disagree with him about older people are you complimenting him on his intellect?

    15. Re:Searl missed the point. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      http://www.wired.com/2014/06/turing-test-not-so-fast/

    16. Re:Searl missed the point. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      ... So now we have Searl out the way, has anybody got an actual argument that supports the notion that the Turing Test is broken by design? - Seriously, I would like to hear a good one!

      I will repeat an older comment I saw here in Slashdot:
      My two year old knows when I'm mad, what he did that made me mad, and how to look adorable so he avoids the consequences. When your AI can do that come talk to me.

    17. Re:Searl missed the point. by Zalbik · · Score: 1

      Simple. A "large" number of humans would fail it. Many "Turing tests" are set up so that a phrase generator could pass the test, not a phrase response generator, but a simple list of sentences, played in order.

      For sufficiently small values of "large", maybe. IMO, the Turing test has great value when used with scientific rigor.

      1) There should be no silly restrictions. No 13 year old children, no foreign language constraints. No script restrictions.
      2) It should be (as Turing originally proposed) a conversation involving 3 people. The examiner, a human and a computer. This way the examiner can compare in real time the responses of the human to the reponses of the computer.
      3) The examiner should be well-versed in computers.

      I suspect there are no existing chatbots that could pass a test described as above.

      My simple definition of AI is any program capable of making something smarter than it. Humans fit that definition,

      Then humans do not fit that definition. We don't create our children....children happen spontaneously as a result of (enjoyable) biological acts that we instigate. We have no control / input into their development prior to birth, at which point they are already pre-designed for AI. Put another way: are those people incapable of having children still intelligent?

      But understanding isn't AI.

      I disagree. Understanding is one of the central points of AI, and the point we have so far struggled with. What Searle (somewhat intentionally) misses in his argument is that although the individual doesn't understand Chinese, the system understands Chinese. His argument is similar to saying that an amputee with artificial limbs can't walk cause the person isn't doing the walking.

  67. Re:Wake me up when those program solve this proble by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Why shouldn't I switch you off right now?

    That's a good one. Any human receiving that from other than a killer would translate as hang up the line.

  68. Transscript? by Tolvor · · Score: 1

    Anyone have a link to the transcript of the conversation? It is easy to say the Turing Test has been been passed, but how well it was passed will show in the quality of the conversation.

    It could easily be:
    (Human) How are you doing?
    (AI) Whatever.
    (Human) Yeah, don't I know how that feels. Did you watch the game?
    (AI) Nah.
    (Human) Man did you miss a great game. What are you into?
    (AI) I like playing with my Gameboy
    (Human) Cool. Which game?
    (AI) Whatever.
    (Human) Wow, sounds like you're really into it. Are you winning?
    (AI) Nah.

    The quality of the conversation does matter when calling a "Pass"

  69. Poor Turing by RazorSharp · · Score: 1

    It's a shame this is what he's most remembered for. He was brilliant but his "test" was incorrect. I doubt he would still support it as a standard of true AI if he were alive today, able to see our modern computers and the massive amounts of data they can hurl around. Perhaps it's possible to create a conscious machine but I don't think that Eugene Goostman is one.

    Perhaps a better standard would be an intelligence that makes decisions of its own choosing -- basically, one that can defy the constraints of its programming and have an original will. I guess that's a bit harder to unambiguously define. Something like Neuromancer/Wintermute.

    --
    "From the depths of my skeptical and rationalist soul, I ask the Lord to protect me from California touchie-feeliedom."
  70. I thought the Turing test was: by Nyder · · Score: 1

    How much good you can do for a country, while they dump on you for being gay.

    Add the number of years after the person died before they "apologize" for being gay bashers back when.

    So if a computer program can fool that many numbers (as a percentage), then it's okay to be dicks to peeps who are different if after their death we apologize for our bigot grandparents.

    --
    Be seeing you...
  71. How useful is this bot? by fufufang · · Score: 1

    The program pretends that it is a "13-year-old boy". How often do you take advice from 13-year-old-boys? I assume that Slashdot is not rampant with teenagers.

  72. Reads like a typical spambot by Guppy06 · · Score: 1

    “I feel about beating the turing test in quite convenient way. Nothing original,” said Goostman, when asked how he felt after his success.

    I get the feeling this is less about improvements in AI and more about Eastern European spammers lowering our expectations.

  73. Eliza and the Turing Test by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    au contraire ...
          In the early 1970's, when Eliza was new, there were psychologists saying things like "it's not quite ready for field trials yet, but it's getting close."
          I was there at the time, and found that a bit hard to believe. But there it was.

    1. Re:Eliza and the Turing Test by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I must admit in the '70s I got fooled by Eliza. I was 5 at the time. :)

  74. Texas by fyngyrz · · Score: 1

    Then how do you account for the school textbook issues?

    --
    I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
    1. Re:Texas by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Then how do you account for the school textbook issues?

      Bad sense of humour?

  75. Re:Wake me up when those program solve this proble by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I should think - alas, but speaking as a university faculty member - that 30% of freshmen at the average state university would not deal with this question correctly (even leaving out the mangled grammar.)
          And there's always the old joke of having a test with instructions, somewhat longer, but in the spirit of: "Answer the following questions. Read all the instructions before you answer any questions. Skip all questions except the last one." which have been shown to fool a significant proportion of young people faced with the puzzle.

  76. The 'test' was fixed by Camael · · Score: 5, Insightful

    What has been conducted precisely matches Turing's proposed immitation game.

    While they may have matched the letter of it, they subverted the spirit of the test. This quote from the programme maker in particular is highly suggestive that they lowered the standards :-

    The computer programme claims to be a 13-year-old boy from Odessa in Ukraine.

    "Our main idea was that he can claim that he knows anything, but his age also makes it perfectly reasonable that he doesn't know everything," said Vladimir Veselov, one of the creators of the programme. "We spent a lot of time developing a character with a believable personality."

    To illustrate what I mean by lowered standards, imagine if I set up the same test, with 10 entries, and I tell the judges some of them are 2 year old babies playing on the keyboard. Armed with this information, some of the judges are likely to interpret even gibberish as typed by a human and it is not too farfetched to get more than 30% of them to agree.

    This "result" is bollocks and a pure publicity stunt conveniently on falling on the 60th anniversary of Turing's death.

    I want to see the actual transcripts which do not appear to have been released so far, which in itself is highly suspicious.

    1. Re:The 'test' was fixed by Jane+Q.+Public · · Score: 1

      Turing explicitly said the test must be done in "natural language". While it violated the spirit, it violated the letter too because it did not use "natural language" of the speakers of that language. It used this as a trick to try to subvert the process.

      It wasn't just "the spirit" (even though that is the most important part. It was also the letter.

      "Natural language" must be considered to be general level of language and understanding of whoever is giving the test. Otherwise the test itself admits to meaninglessness.

      In the U.S., laws are required to follow the logic of a "reasonable person", presumed to be both common and an adult. If you presume other standards you can "prove" anything you like, but again, as I originally stated: in the real world you have proved nothing.

    2. Re:The 'test' was fixed by 91degrees · · Score: 1

      But you wouldn't really argue that a 2 year old was capable of demonstrating functional intelligence.

    3. Re:The 'test' was fixed by Dr.+Spork · · Score: 5, Insightful
      Here was a sample of a hypothetical conversation from Turing's original article:

      Interrogator: In the first line of your sonnet which reads "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day," would not "a spring day" do as well or better?

      Witness: It wouldn't scan.

      Interrogator: How about "a winter's day," That would scan all right.

      Witness: Yes, but nobody wants to be compared to a winter's day.

      Interrogator: Would you say Mr. Pickwick reminded you of Christmas?

      Witness: In a way.

      Interrogator: Yet Christmas is a winter's day, and I do not think Mr. Pickwick would mind the comparison.

      Witness: I don't think you're serious. By a winter's day one means a typical winter's day, rather than a special one like Christmas.

      I think the problem is that the way Turing was picturing the test, the human interrogators would be as smart as Turing and his friends, people who actually know how to ask probing questions. When you look at the conversation above, you see that he had in mind a program that does things which is decades beyond of what chatbots can do today. Everybody is dissing the Turing test, and if it has a problem, it's in that Turing overestimated people, in assuming that they actually know how to have conversations of significance. I still think there is something deeply significant about the Turing test, but in the one that I'm picturing, the interrogators must all be broadly educated experts on natural language processing with specific training in how to expose chatbots. And there should be money on the line for the interrogators: $1000 bonus for each correct identification, $2000 penalty for incorrect identification, no penalty for "not sure". If the majority of such experts can be fooled by an AI under these circumstances, then I think we should all be impressed.

    4. Re:The 'test' was fixed by paskie · · Score: 1

      +1 Insightful. :-) Now, this is something I completely agree on - we need a better test than the original immitation game, with some restrictions and incentives. Hmm, that actually almost sounds like a TV show!

      Your proposal sounds fairly reasonable, though I think "exposing chatbots" is way too aggressive - we don't need Blade Runner style interrogations, that just doesn't seem like that sensible a goal. We just want to push the conversations to a higher, intellectual level to test the computers' ability to deduce and relate like a human; pick people accordingly and also offer incentives for winning against the computer.

      --
      It's not the fall that kills you. It's the sudden stop at the end. -Douglas Adams
    5. Re:The 'test' was fixed by Katatsumuri · · Score: 1

      One of the transcripts, from an earlier competition. About as bad as always. http://parsely.tumblr.com/post...

    6. Re:The 'test' was fixed by bluefoxlucid · · Score: 1

      By spirit, you mean intent.

    7. Re:The 'test' was fixed by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Both are correct

    8. Re:The 'test' was fixed by dbIII · · Score: 1

      the human interrogators would be as smart as Turing and his friends

      Thus "intelligence" and not other human activity such as cheering at a sporting event when events happen or other things that follow simpler and easier to script rules for a mechanical turk.

    9. Re:The 'test' was fixed by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      2 year olds can learn to speak and do tasks so can demonstrate a functional intelligence

    10. Re:The 'test' was fixed by nil0lab · · Score: 1

      bluefoxlucid, your sig expired

      nilbot

    11. Re:The 'test' was fixed by bluefoxlucid · · Score: 1

      That happens a lot with whitehouse.gov petitions. They were originally designed to be reachable; now they're designed to be reachable if national media attention highlights them.

    12. Re:The 'test' was fixed by Camael · · Score: 1

      Thanks for the link. This pretty much proves it was a set-up. If this was the level of the programme's response during the actual test, I cannot imagine how it could ever be interpreted as human (much less a 13 year old non native English speaker).

    13. Re:The 'test' was fixed by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      What we need is a better way for you to learn to spell imitation correctly. Or are you a computer pretending to be a 10yo Ukrainian kid who doesn't speak English well?

    14. Re:The 'test' was fixed by 91degrees · · Score: 1

      Okay, but how about that specific 2 year old, playing on the keyboard?

  77. What improvement? by Camael · · Score: 1

    still though, it's an improvement over past attempts.

    No, previous failed attempts attempted to simulate a normal human adult conversant in the English language. This programme fooled the judges by lowering the acceptable standards to be judged human by telling them it was (1) a 13 year old (2) non-native English speaker from Ukraine.

    This is like claiming a goal after moving the goalposts.

  78. turing test for humans by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    unfortunately, i know some youth that dont pass the turing test for demonstrating they are fully human and not just programmed drones.

  79. Re:Wake me up when those program solve this proble by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Thank you! Every time the turing test comes up, I wonder how a human could possibly be fooled unless the AI could handle moderate complexity questions like that.

    Most chatbots can't even pass:

    "x is 2. what is x?"

    So unless the humans testing the AI have no idea how to go about it, they should never be fooled. I guess part of the test requires that the humans doing the testing are layman.

  80. Sigh by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    The Turing Test was passed YEARS ago when a manager found Eliza running on a computer and thought he was talking to his IT guy working from home.

  81. Re:Wake me up when those program solve this proble by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    When one AI not specifically programmed for that problem answer it correctly, I will be surprised and intrigued. Until then chatbot are just using cheap tricks to fool human.

    Write it up in a paper and you can have a test named after you. :)

  82. Nope. Fail. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    If passing off a computer as a Ukrainian child among English-speaking adults is a "pass," then the Turing Test was already passed the moment it could pretend to be an infant randomly striking keys, or a toddler typing basic monosyllabic sentences.

    Nope. For the test to be genuinely passed, an intelligent adult - not necessarily a computer expert, but an intelligent person nonetheless - must be convinced that on the other end of a conversation is another intelligent adult with the same cultural background so that oddities cannot be waved off as misunderstandings.

  83. My first program passed the Turing Test by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    That was decades ago... it sat there and did NOTHING. I told people it was a person in a "vegitative state" and they were all impressed by the exacting precision of its responses to their queries - it was a PERFECT simulation!!!!

    This is, of course, the idiocy of the current claim: They told people it was a KID from a FOREIGN COUNTRY (which manipulates the "testers" into pre-screening-out much of their skepticisms which WOULD arise from bad vocabulary, poor grammar, poor knowlege, bad judgement, and apparent confusion)

  84. Re:Wake me up when those program solve this proble by MadKeithV · · Score: 1

    How unspecific does it have to be? Be specific!

    Are you demanding rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty?

  85. The next test by knobo · · Score: 1

    The test is passed when an AI bot talks with it self and knows it's not human, because humans are not that smart.

  86. Re:Wake me up when those program solve this proble by martin-boundary · · Score: 1

    Why you hate Ukrainian boy? You try discriminatio to me? I no play game I real! Help me everybody I repression to me!

  87. they cheated! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Imitating a 13 year old boy all they had to do is teach it to say "I don't know"

  88. Re:Wake me up when those program solve this proble by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    "x is 2. what is x?"

    A letter :)

  89. Young Ukrainian boys dot com by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I think there's a way to monetize this new technology.
    I'm Chris Hanson and this is ...

  90. Questions should be "different" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    To test for human or machine, the questions should be different than what
    we build software to do. Don't test for problem solving, math, knowledge
    retention, etc. Test for ability to have common sense.

    e.g.

    If I have 27 pairs of blue socks, will they all fit into one wash?
    or
    If I have twelve pairs of socks, and buy 2 more pair, but then after washing them all,
    I notice one has a hole in the heel, how many good pairs of socks do I have?
    or
    An airplane flies over me, and it is upside down. The pilot looks towards me as he passes overhead.
    Does the pilot have to lift or lower his chin to look towards me?

    These kind of unique questions need full understanding and cannot be merely looked up
    like the game show playing program.

    1. Re:Questions should be "different" by neminem · · Score: 1

      Except, if you asked the average teenager you didn't know a question phrased like that, his answer would likely be "I don't know and I don't care. Go away." You don't need to give the *correct* answer, just a *human-like* one. Thus, the brilliance of this particular attempt, though it also does feel a bit like cheating.

  91. Or, more machine-like humans? by g1durkee · · Score: 1

    I've had a lot of email exchanges with my fellow government workers where I thought their responses were generated by poorly programmed AI.

  92. Response patterns by cwsumner · · Score: 1

    It only passed because 90% of humans respond on the internet with no more thought than a computer! 8-)

    Standard word patterns that are sent as a "symbol" no more advanced than pictographs, just because it is what they heard "cool" people say.
    People can think, but they often don't...

  93. Can't Trick Turing by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    The Turing Test is about imitating a human perfectly well, or at least well enough that 30% of people will judge it so a priori.

    This test just tries to trick 30% of people into believing a machine is a human.

    See the difference?

  94. Could be used for cybercrime by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Name one technology, software, chemical, or mathematical process that cannot possibly be used for criminal purposes. I'll wait.

  95. I made a program that passed the Turing test too. by TsuruchiBrian · · Score: 1

    It simulates a newborn baby. I opened sourced to code so others can use it

    while(true) {
    __switch(rand() % 4) {
    ____case 0: cout ____case 1: cout ____case 2: cout ____default: cout __} }

    The singularity is here...

  96. Dupe by DarthVain · · Score: 1

    Do the results mean that AI is getting smarter, or that Humans are getting dumber?

  97. No, Not really by Paul+server+guy · · Score: 1

    https://www.techdirt.com/artic...

    This isn't the first time people have wrongly announced this either.

    --
    Your Moon, Your Mission, Get involved! http://www.openluna.org
  98. New test: The spam bot by Keybounce · · Score: 1

    The real questions are:
    1. Can it convince 33% of the readers that it really is a rich Norwegian businessman wanting to send you money?
    2. Can it solve Caphas 33% of the time on the first attempt?
    3. Can it co wreck spelling properly at least 33% of the time?

  99. An autist chat simulator duped 100% of people. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    After seeing this work in action, I learned a very good lesson: the Turing Test is nothing but academic masturbatory fodder. It is not something to be taken seriously.

    This is like saying we shouldn't read Les Miserables because of Russell Crowe's singing in the shitty movie version of it.

  100. Not a Turing Test by jnana · · Score: 2

    What nonsense! A program pretending to be an immature person with poor language comprehension and speaking ability, and incapable of talking about a large number of topics that can't be discussed with a vocabulary of 400 words and little life experience is not at all what the test is about. Turing expected an intelligent interrogator who could have a wide-ranging discussion about almost anything with the unknown other. Here's a snippet from his paper that introduces the idea of the Turing test, which he just referred to as the imitation game:

    Interrogator: In the first line of your sonnet which reads "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day," would not "a spring day" do as well or better?
    Witness: It wouldn't scan.
    Interrogator: How about "a winter's day," That would scan all right.
    Witness: Yes, but nobody wants to be compared to a winter's day.

    Interrogator: Would you say Mr. Pickwick reminded you of Christmas?
    Witness: In a way.
    Interrogator: Yet Christmas is a winter's day, and I do not think Mr. Pickwick would mind the comparison.
    Witness: I don't think you're serious. By a winter's day one means a typical winter's day, rather than a special one like Christmas.

  101. Nothing new here by jnana · · Score: 1

    Scott Aaronson reveals his discussion with the chatbot. Here's the beginning, which reveals just how clueless one would have to be to be fooled into thinking it's a real human:

    Scott: Which is bigger, a shoebox or Mount Everest?
    Eugene: I can't make a choice right now. I should think it out later. And I forgot to ask you where you are from...

    Scott: How many legs does a camel have?
    Eugene: Something between 2 and 4. Maybe, three? :-))) By the way, I still don't know your specialty -- or, possibly, I've missed it?

    Scott: How many legs does a millipede have?
    Eugene: Just two, but Chernobyl mutants may have them up to five. I know you are supposed to trick me.

    Scott: No, I need to know that you're not a chatbot. Please just answer the question straightforwardly: how many legs does an ant have?
    Eugene: Something between 2 and 4. Maybe, three? :-))) Oh, what a fruitful conversation;-)

    Scott: Do you understand why I'm asking such basic questions? Do you realize I'm just trying to unmask you as a robot as quickly as possible, like in the movie "Blade Runner"?
    Eugene: ...wait

    Read on. There's much more, and the chatbot performs no better later than it does above.

  102. Re:Wake me up when those program solve this proble by Triklyn · · Score: 1

    i'm afraid dave.

  103. Believe in AI? by Ruralhack · · Score: 0

    You have it.

    1. Re:Believe in AI? by presidenteloco · · Score: 1

      Arguably, artificial intelligence is better than natural stupidity.

      --

      Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
  104. Only Texan I've Met by HannethCom · · Score: 1

    The only Texan I've met was this teenage girl that when she was old enough to drive she wanted a Ferrari, or a Pickup Truck. I couldn't help but think the dichotomy was very stereotypical Texan.

    --
    Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon what's the difference? All steal money from devs and control with walled gardens.
    1. Re:Only Texan I've Met by Anubis+IV · · Score: 1

      Hah, yeah, we do have our share of stuff like that. Texans love their pickups, to be sure. I even use one as my primary vehicle, despite not actually liking them in particular (no gun rack in the rear window of mine though :P).

  105. More clever chatbot beats Eugene's achievement by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    UK-based computer scientist claims to be able to write a chatbot emulating a drunkard and a 2-month old baby and pass the Turing test, see:
    http://www.mathrix.org/liquid/archives/the-turing-test-pass-fiasco

  106. Next step : The Blade Runner test by indybob · · Score: 0

    Holden: Yes. You're in a desert, walking along in the sand when all of a sudden you look down and see a...
    Leon: What one?
    Holden: What?
    Leon: What desert?
    (...)
    Holden: Describe in single words. Only the good things that come to your mind. About your mother.
    Leon: My mother... I'll tell you about my mother. (Bang)

    http://www.devo.com/bladerunne...

  107. Is Slashdot into Alzheimer? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Slashdot has published plenty of prior news about Turing Tests done better than this. Amnesia? Let me remember it for you: http://tech.slashdot.org/story/10/10/24/1754216/chatbot-suzette-wins-20th-annual-loebner-prize-fools-one-judge
    -Ignacio Agulló