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The Profoundly Weird, Gender-Specific Roots of the Turing Test
malachiorion writes: Alan Turing never wrote about the Turing Test, that legendary measure of machine intelligence that researchers claimed to have passed last weekend. He proposed something much stranger — a contest between men and machines, to see who was better at pretending to be a woman. The details of the Imitation Game aren't secret, or even hard to find, and yet no one seems to reference it. This article explains why they should — in part because it's so odd, but also because it might be a better test for 'machines that think' than the chatbot-infested, seemingly useless Turing Test.
Some vending machines have the best impressions of women: take your money for nothing in return and then pretend like nothing happened ;-)
Table-ized A.I.
It's more like a case of people pushing the goal posts back to where they originally were, after some over zealous AI zealot moved them forward to make his failure look like a success...
Which has more power: the hammer, or the anvil?
to understand how a machine could be made to pass the Turing test (or the woman test) honestly and thoroughly. To do so, it would have to understand arbitrary human statements and questions: not just "why is the sky blue?" (relatively easy) but "why doesn't my wife understand me?" and "is the real rational, as Hegel posited, and if so (or not) why (not)?" Note that the machine could reasonably pretend to know nothing about Hegel, but it would have to react like a normal human being. No obfuscation such as pretending to be foreign, a child, thoroughly ignorant, or befuddled by drugs should be accepted.
Going a little further, it would have to cope with (very) simple jokes such as "I asked my dog which team would win the World Cup"/"What did he say?"/"Nothing. HE'S A DOG".
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
I have one wife, one ex-wife, one mother, one step-mother, one sister, one step-daughter, and more non-immediate female relationships/acquaintances than I care to enumerate. ANYONE could fake a woman in a chat with me, because from experience, I have no idea what to expect.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
Define "profound". You make it sound like men and women's minds start from completely different places and end up converging on similarity, but that's absurd. Men and women differ statistically over populations, but individuals might fall pretty much anywhere in the spectrums of things that differ. There's no way I would be confident of identifying the gender of an individual in this sort of scenario. Statistically, I'm sure I could do a lot better than chance, but each one is pretty uncertain.
Try it the other way around - men and women's minds start from essentially the same foundation, but then diverge thanks to profoundly different optimal reproductive strategies (with all the contingent physical and hormonal differences evolution has thus adopted), cultural indoctrination, and no doubt myriad other minor factors. Certainly the standard deviation is greater than the population difference on many fronts, maybe most, but the distinction is undeniable to anyone closely and honestly involved with numerous members of both genders. Grab any two random individuals of opposite genders and you will almost certainly find certain characteristic differences between them.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.