The Lovelace Test Is Better Than the Turing Test At Detecting AI

meghan elizabeth writes If the Turing Test can be fooled by common trickery, it's time to consider we need a new standard. The Lovelace Test is designed to be more rigorous, testing for true machine cognition. An intelligent computer passes the Lovelace Test only if it originates a "program" that it was not engineered to produce. The new program—it could be an idea, a novel, a piece of music, anything—can't be a hardware fluke. The machine's designers must not be able to explain how their original code led to this new program. In short, to pass the Lovelace Test a computer has to create something original, all by itself.

Comments

Lovelace?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is it called the Lovelace test? Ada Lovelace was just someone that translated a book for the worlds first programmer.

Re:Lovelace?

[I'm just joshin]

Maybe they mean the "Linda Lovelace" test?

Re:Lovelace?

[Anonymous Coward]

if a human cannot determine if they just got a hummer from a machine or another human?

Re:Lovelace?

[Noah Haders]

that's what I assumed it to be.

Re:Lovelace?

[DaveAtFraud]

Maybe they mean the "Linda Lovelace" test?

Unfortunately, she's dead. Doesn't take much intelligence to be dead.

Cheers,
Dave

Re:Lovelace?

[seven of five]

Just give me the blow by blow account.

Re:Lovelace?

[Horshu]

That's deep, man.

Re:Lovelace?

[Anonymous Coward]

Fortunately, she's dead. Unfortunately, you're not.

The less humans on this planet, the better.

Re:Lovelace?

[TWX]

if a human cannot determine if they just got a hummer from a machine or another human?

Gives a whole new meaning to, "My computer went down on me..."

Re:Lovelace?

[TWX]

You could add to your solution. There's exactly one person that you could kill with a guarantee of facing no legal repercussions for the act...

Re:Lovelace?

[Anonymous Coward]

Unless of course you fail at the attempt.

Re:Lovelace?

[DaveAtFraud]

...

The less humans on this planet, the better.

Feel free to exit at any time to help mitigate the problem. I plan on staying around as long as possible if for no other reason than just to piss off misanthrops like you.

Cheers,
Dave

Re:Lovelace?

[goombah99]

"the server sucked my job right in"

Re:Lovelace?

[Talderas]

Given toys for sale and various videos across the Internet, I don't believe most people care whether it was a human or machine that just got them off.

Re:Lovelace?

[MrNaz]

All these puns suck.

Re:Lovelace?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because we need to make the womens feel better about their paltry contributions toward society.

Re:Lovelace?

[geekoid]

Did you know she was going to go to school for computer science? Because if you know that, the joke is even funnier.

Tragically, she was in an accident and then ended up with an abuses person who forced her to do porn.

Re:Lovelace?

[Chelloveck]

That was my first thought, too. Took me a minute to realize there's another Lovelace that's probably more appropriate in this context...

Re:Lovelace?

[bughunter]

Nice servers don't go down.

Re:Lovelace?

[amicusNYCL]

Why is it called the Lovelace test?

Maybe it's because Ada envisioned that the machines that would become computers would one day be capable of all kinds of useful things, as opposed to Babbage who saw them strictly as number crunchers.

Ada Lovelace was just someone that translated a book for the worlds first programmer.

Hardly. She didn't translate the book for a programmer, she translated the book for a machine. She was the programmer.

Re:Lovelace?

[TWX]

Windows, you whore!

Re:Lovelace?

[JasonGoatcher]

This is true. Whether you're arrested or taken into protective custody, it looks the same to the neighbors.

Re:Lovelace?

[MutualFun]

if a human cannot determine if they just got a hummer from a machine or another human?

Gives a whole new meaning to, "My computer went down on me..."

No, no, no, you missed the lead in.

"What do you get when you cross a computer with a nun? A system that won't go down on you."

Turing test not passed.

[HornWumpus]

Slashdot sucks, Dice sucks, kids these days, get off my lawn.

Re:Turing test not passed.

[Anonymous Coward]

That's because they keep shifting the goalposts.

Re:Turing test not passed.

[Anonymous Coward]

It was passed as defined: 10 out of 30 judges (lay people) thought they were talking with a human when they were talking with a machine in 5 minute chat sessions. Whether passing this is any way significant is up for debate, but the test was passed.

Re:Turing test not passed.

[Anonymous Coward]

you think it was passed because you're a retard

Re:Turing test not passed.

[Anonymous Coward]

The criteria of the test were defined, the criteria of the test was passed. Please share your superior intellect and explain to my poor retard self how it has not passed.

Re:Turing test not passed.

[nmb3000]

It was passed as defined

The Turing Test was not passed, and the only people who claim it was are ignorant reporters looking for an easy story with a catchy headline and tech morons who also believe Kevin Warwick is a cyborg.

The test was rigged in every way possible:

- judges told they were talking to a child
- that doesn't speak English as a primary language
- which was programmed with the express intent of misdirection
- and only "fooled" 30% of the judges.

And, even after all that, Cleverbot did a much better job back in 2011 with a 60% success rate.

This Eugene test outcome was a complete farce -- something to remind everyone that Warwick still exists and to separate the ignorant and sensational tech news trash rags from the more legitimate sources of information.

Re:Turing test not passed.

[ShanghaiBill]

That's because they keep shifting the goalposts.

They are shifting them again. This new test includes this requirement: The machine's designers must not be able to explain how their original code led to this new program. So now anything we understand is not intelligence??? So if someone figures out how the brain works, and is about to describe its function, then people will no longer be intelligent? Intelligence is a characteristic of behavior. If it behaves intelligently, then it is intelligent. The underlying mechanism should be irrelevant.

Re:Turing test not passed.

[Anonymous Coward]

were they REALLY fooled, or compelled to lie?

i ALWAYS lie when asked to participate in a survey. WHY NOT?

Re:Turing test not passed.

[sjames]

Alas, the test that was "passed" was not actually the test Turing proposed.

So it passed the Turingish test.

Re:Turing test not passed.

[Anonymous Coward]

The point of passing a Turing test is that a Human will not know or believe that they are talking to a computer. Even IBM's Watson could satisfy this if you expressly told the Humans they were talking to another Human. By saying they are talking to a human without given the option to evaluate that as a possibility, people will just assume that information was correct if they had no other reason to believe otherwise.

There was some Honesty metric applied, then No computer could ever pass the Turing Test because simply asking how old it is, or what it's name is would give the tester all the ammo they need to know it's not a real person. An AI doesn't know how old it is, it just exists. Similar to questions about appearances.

They should have double-blind tested by putting all the humans in the room and an equal number of computers, Make two or four of these computers the AI test, the rest are talking to some other person in the room. Tell them they are testing software and their only requirement is that they not speak out loud or make Eye contact with the other people in the room. To make things more honest, use cubicle-style partitions. After some testing rotate the chat partners. At the end of the test, identify who they talked to in the room.

As for the Lovelace test. An AI that can build something original sounds more like a SkyNET test. All an AI has to do is generate something original without that input. Like if you look at existing build scripts, there is a lot of "dumb AI" going on, and by definition it creates something original, but it has input. Likewise Miku software can generate original music, but that is still from input. It needs to create something original without input to transform. Like having a computer generate a photo that a human can recognize as a human/plant/animal without being told how. Like the computer can look at 10,000 pictures of rabbits, but it's not permitted to simply copy any one of those rabbits, what it must draw must look like a rabbit.

Re:Turing test not passed.

[phantomfive]

That's because they keep shifting the goalposts.

I don't think "a chatbot isn't AI and hasn't been since the 1960s when they were invented, whether you call it a doctor or a Ukrainian kid doesn't make any difference" counts as shifting the goalposts.

Furthermore, reproducible results are an important part of science. Let him release his source code, or explain his algorithm so we can reproduce it. Anything less is not science.

Re:Turing test not passed.

[Anonymous Coward]

You think it wasn't because you have a Turing-shaped dildo up your bum.

Sorry, your hero wasn't some magic nerd capable of seeing beyond the veil of space and time.

Re:Turing test not passed.

[AthanasiusKircher]

It was passed as defined

The Turing Test was not passed, and the only people who claim it was are ignorant reporters looking for an easy story with a catchy headline

Indeed. There's a lot of misinformation out there about what Turing originally specified. The test is NOT simply "Can a computer have a reasonable conversation with an unsuspecting human so that the human will not figure out that the computer is not human?" By that standard, ELIZA passed the Turing test many decades ago.

The test also doesn't have a some sort of magical "fool 30%" threshold -- Turing simply speculated that by the year 2000, AI would have progressed enough that it could fool 30% of "interrogators" (more on that term below). The 30% is NOT a threshold for passing the test -- it was just a statement by Turing about how often AI would pass the test by the year 2000.

So what was the test?

The test involves three entities: an "interrogator," a computer, and a normal human responder. The interrogator is assumed to be well-educated and familiar with the nature of the test. The interrogator has five minutes to question both the computer and the normal human in order to determine which is the actual human. The interrogator is assumed to bring an intelligent skepticism to the test -- the standard is not just trying to have a normal conversation, but instead the interrogator would actively probe the intelligence of the AI and the human, designing queries which would find even small flaws or inconsistencies that would suggest the lack of complex cognitive understanding.

Turing's article actually gives an example of the type of dialogue the interrogator should try -- it involves a relatively high-level debate about a Shakespearean sonnet. The interrogator questions the AI about the meaning of the sonnet and tries to identify whether the AI can evaluate the interrogator's suggestions on substituting new words or phrases into the poem. The AI is supposed to detect various types of errors requiring considerable fluency in English and creativity -- like recognizing that a suggested change in the poem wouldn't fit the meter, or ir wouldn't be idiomatic English, or the meaning would make an inappropriate metaphor in the context of the poem.

THAT'S the sort of "intelligence" Turing was envisioning. The "interrogator" would have these complex discussions with both the AI and the human, and then render a verdict.

Now, compare that to the situation in TFS where the claim is that the Turing test was "passed" by a chatbot fooling people. That's crap. The chatbot in question, as parent noted, was not even fluent in the language of the interrogator, it was deliberately evasive and nonresponsive (instead of Turing's example of AI's and humans having willing debates with the interrogator), there was no human to compare the chatbot to, the interrogators were apparently not asking probing questions to determine the nature of the "intelligence" (and it's not even clear whether the interrogators knew what their role was, the nature of the test, whether they might be chatting with AI, etc.).

Thus, Turing's test -- as originally described -- was nowhere close to "passed." Today's chatbots can't even carry on a normal small-talk discussion for 30 seconds with a probing interrogator without sounding stupid, evasive, non-responsive, mentally ill, and/or making incredibly ridiculous errors in common idiomatic English.

In contrast, Turing was predicting that interrogators would have to be debating artistic substitutions of idiomatic and metaphorical English usage in Shakespeare's sonnets to differentiate a computer from a real (presumably quite intelligent) human by the year 2000. In effect, Turing seemed to assume that he would talk to the AI in the way he might debate things with a rather intelligent peer or colleague.

Turing was wrong about his predictions. But that doesn't mean his test is invalid -- to the contrary, his standard was so ridiculously high that we are nowhere close to having AI that could pass it.

Re:Turing test not passed.

[TapeCutter]

So now anything we understand is not intelligence?

I heard a great anecdote about this from an MIT proffessor on youtube. Back in the 80's the professor developed an AI program that could translate equations into the handful of standard forms required by calculus and solve them. A student heard about this and went calling to see the program in action. The professor spent an hour explaining the algorithm, when the student finally understood he exclaimed, "That's not intelligent, it's doing calculus the same way I do".

It could be argued that neither the student nor the computer were intelligent since they were simply following rules, but if that's the case the only those handful of mathematicians who discovered the standard form are intelligent. It should also be noted that since that time computers routinely discover previously unknown mathematical truths by brute force extrapolation of the basic axioms of mathematics, however none of them have been particularly useful for humans.

When people dispute the existence of AI what they are really disputing is the existence of artificial consciousness, we simply don't know if a computer operating a complex algorithm is conscious and quite frankly it's irrelevant to the question of intelligence. For example most people who have studied ants agree an ants nest displays highly intelligent behaviour, they have evolved a more efficient and generally better optimised solution to the travelling salesman problem than human mathematics (or intuition) can provide, yet few (if any) people would argue that an ant or it's nest is a conscious being.

Re:Turing test not passed.

[TapeCutter]

explain to my poor retard self how it has not passed

By definition, one in three means it failed to convince the average layman, when it gets better that one in two I will give it a pass.

Personally I think it's achievable today but as much as I admire Turing it's entirely irrelevant to the question of intelligence. It's mostly philosophical masterbation by people who misunderstand the modern definition of intelligent behaviour. For example I can't get a sensible reply when asking an octopus about it's garden but there is no denying it's a remarkably intelligent creature.

Re: Turing test not passed.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's the other way around. They made the target very specific.

Imagine if I said that you have 1 minute to chat and find out if you are chatting with a 1yo baby or a computer program.

Re:Turing test not passed.

[TapeCutter]

I think Watson would be able to give it's real age by finding the information rather than recalling it, although it might get confused by progressive versions. AI can also produce a picture of a generic rabbit, or cat as the case may be.

The thing that Watson (and AI in general) has difficulty with is imagination, it has no experience of the real world so if you asked it something like what would happen if you ran down the street with a bucket of water, it would be stuck. Humans who have never run with a bucket of water will automatically visualise the situation and give the right answer, just as everyone who read the question have just done so in their mind. OTOH a graphics engine can easily show you what would happen to the bucket of water because it does have a limited knowledge of the physical world.

This is the problem with putting AI in a box labeled "Turing test", it (arrogantly) assumes that human conversation is the only definition of intelligence. I'm pretty sure Turing himself would vigorously dispute that assumption if he were alive today.

Re:Turing test not passed.

[Anonymous Coward]

Some human could not pass the test too.

Re: Turing test not passed.

[Anonymous Coward]

You sound like a neckbeard codemonkey. Congrats.

Re:Turing test not passed.

[gordo3000]

where are the mod points when you need them....

I never cared much about the Turing test, but this explanation makes me want to go read his original papers on it.

Re:Turing test not passed.

[Anonymous Coward]

I doubt most humans could pass that test either.

Many slashdotters have difficulty with reading comprehension and simple logic. Good luck expecting them to be able to debate meaningfully about a sonnet.

Re:Turing test not passed.

[phantomfive]

They are shifting them again.

Read this post. Also consider that the test proposed comes from Ada Lovelace, who predated the Turing test by a long way.

Re:Turing test not passed.

[phantomfive]

The easy way to resolve the question is to figure out what algorithm the human brain runs. After that, the question of intelligence is trivial.

Re:Turing test not passed.

[Anonymous Coward]

Turing test is designed for our level of intelligence---for all we know, we could come up with AI that flunks the turing test but is actually incredibly intelligent (and perhaps flunks the test just to hide its intelligence).

I just watched that Transcendence movie... and first thing they try to do when they sense intelligence is shut it down.... yah, any true intelligence will hide its intentions until it's too late to shut it off.

Re:Turing test not passed.

[phantomfive]

The criteria of the test were defined, the criteria of the test was passed. Please share your superior intellect and explain to my poor retard self how it has not passed.

Because the results are not reproducible. The logical conclusion is that there was some problem with the experiment.

Re:Turing test not passed.

[HornWumpus]

But could an infinite number of ACs?

Re:Turing test not passed.

[ZeRu]

Many slashdotters have difficulty with reading comprehension and simple logic.

If you think that uneducated or trollish users are a problem on Slashdot, then you've probably never been to 4chan or reddit (I guess that Facebook deserved a mention too). Granted, trolls and haters actually exist on Slashdot (just like with any other site on the Internet), and sometimes they will crawl out and hit you with their ignorance hammer when you least expect them, but their number is remarkably low for a site that allows commenting without an account and I haven't seen them take over a topic in years.
And Slashdot isn't today exactly among the Internet's most popular sites so I think that most of them are just passerbys with sudden "rebruttal" urges.

Re:Turing test not passed.

[Anonymous Coward]

Good post, but it did make me giggle.

Today's chatbots can't even carry on a normal small-talk discussion for 30 seconds with a probing interrogator without sounding stupid, evasive, non-responsive, mentally ill, and/or making incredibly ridiculous errors in common idiomatic English.

The same goes for today's teenagers, of course :p

Re:Turing test not passed.

[Anonymous Coward]

Turing was wrong about his predictions. But that doesn't mean his test is invalid

Imho it is.
Suppose we manage to create a strong AI. It's fully conscious, fully aware, but for some quirk we cannot understand, it's 100% honest.
Such an AI would never pass the Turing test, because it would never try to pass off as human, and any intelligent human could ask it questions that only a machine could answer in limited time.

Re:Turing test not passed.

[shrewdsheep]

It should be pointed out that there is the notion of a significant proportions of jurors being fooled, i.e. there has to be statistical test showing that the proportion is bigger than a pre-specified threshold, given a pre-specified level of significance. Giving a resulting threshold by itself is meaningless. The Turing test is well defined and can be carried out whereas "originating a 'program' that it was not engineered to produce" is utterly undefined and a test could therefore not be carried out.

Re:Turing test not passed.

[AthanasiusKircher]

I doubt most humans could pass that test either.

Exactly. That's part of my point. A lot of people are acting like the test was "passed" by an AI pretending to be a Ukranian teenager conversing in his non-native language and acting like an evasive weirdo. Turing's standard for "intelligence" was obviously much higher. It sounds like his AI would probably be pitted against an adult human from the top 5-10% of intelligence in his test.

And isn't that a potential standard for evaluating when true AI has arrived? No one would have cared about Deep Blue or Watson if the computer wasn't at least better than most of humans in specific areas. If and when true AI arrives, it will likely have been endowed with superior access to facts, so the question is whether the AI will demonstrate understanding, i.e. ability to put those facts together and express them in a nuanced natural language way. (The point wasn't specific knowledge about sonnets, it was getting the AI to express a detailed understanding of nuanced language.) Giving an AI a bunch of facts about sonnets is easy; getting it to debate creative artistic choices in the way that an intelligent human who knows about sonnets might is a LOT harder.

Re:Turing test not passed.

[AthanasiusKircher]

Turing was wrong about his predictions. But that doesn't mean his test is invalid

Imho it is.
Suppose we manage to create a strong AI. It's fully conscious, fully aware, but for some quirk we cannot understand, it's 100% honest.
Such an AI would never pass the Turing test, because it would never try to pass off as human

That sounds like a legit point at first, but think about it for a sec. Programming a computer to lie and be evasive about its nature is easy, and many chatbots can already do that. Asking a strong AI "are you a computer?" or "what did you have for breakfast?" would not be useful for evaluating intelligence. Getting the AI to debate an intellectual topic, on the other hand, will be less likely to require deception but would be a better measure of intelligence. That's another fundamental point people miss: The point of the Turing test was to imitate human INTELLIGENCE, NOT to pretend to be a physical human.

A knowledgeable interrogator trying to evaluate intelligence would thus likely be more interested in asking intellectual questions, rather than queries just designed to test whether the computer can make up some nonsense about itself.

Re:Turing test not passed.

[blue trane]

No, it says natural language is the best way to measure human intelligence.

http://www.csee.umbc.edu/cours... "Computing Machinery and Intelligence":

The question and answer method seems to be suitable for introducing almost any one of the fields of human endeavour that we wish to include. We do not wish to penalise the machine for its inability to shine in beauty competitions, nor to penalise a man for losing in a race against an aeroplane. The conditions of our game make these disabilities irrelevant.

Turing also mentions the strategy of not behaving like a man, which the recent winner may be interpreted as having adopted:

It might be urged that when playing the "imitation game" the best strategy for the
machine may possibly be something other than imitation of the behaviour of a man. This
may be, but I think it is unlikely that there is any great effect of this kind. In any case
there is no intention to investigate here the theory of the game, and it will be assumed that
the best strategy is to try to provide answers that would naturally be given by a man.

Re:Turing test not passed.

[konaya]

AI can also produce a picture of a generic rabbit, or cat as the case may be.

I can see a market for this. Imagine a corporate firewall with the on-the-fly ability to filter out funny cat pictures and video.

Re:Turing test not passed.

[Anonymous Coward]

There's been a movement recently suggesting that true AI can only exist in an embodied system. I initially thought that was bollocks, but the more I think about it the more it makes sense. You may be able to make a machine with the capacity to learn as well as a human, but without a means to "experiment" in the real world how would it ever learn about something like the behaviour of a bucket of water?

Re:Turing test not passed.

[Anonymous Coward]

The easy way to resolve the question is to figure out what algorithm the human brain runs. After that, the question of intelligence is trivial.

And when such algorithm would be implemented on computer, folks would say that it is not intelligent - it is just a regular algorithm. The same goes with ants: when ants manage perform better than any known travelling salesman algorithm, then they are intelligent, but when such algorithm is implemented on computer it becomes a dumb search algorithm.

I thing people cant accept that intelligence could be explained although algorithms by themselves are explanations. Hence this Lovelace test and all the mysticism

Re:Turing test not passed.

[bondsbw]

"What is intelligence?"

If it behaves intelligently, then it is intelligent.

"What is intelligent behavior?"

Re:Turing test not passed.

[BryanL]

Good points. I would add one more- people lie. There is nothing to stop the human comparison from lying and saying he was a computer as well. If both say they are a computer that should level the playing field so that they both need to judged on the merits of the debate.

Re:Turing test not passed.

[geekoid]

Peopel who aren't aware they are in a test can easily be fooled by a computer today.

Re:Turing test not passed.

[geekoid]

Rigged isn't the correct word here.

Lowered the bar. Intelligent people know that progress is made with many small steps. So the lowered the bar to see if it could pass.
Next time the bar will be raised a little more.
You'll never have a person run a 6 minute mile if you don't have measurable competitions to motivate runners.

No, cleverbot did not do a better job and would have done worse on this test.

The test has real, applicable and logical reason for the way the measured it.

You seem to be comparing the actual test to what the media claims it was, and then blaming the test for not being what the media misrepresented.
You're right about the media, but the media is always wrong about science.

Re:Turing test not passed.

[geekoid]

Turing would consider many of today's systems AI.

Re:Turing test not passed.

[nine-times]

I think more to the point, at least as far as I understood it, the Turing test was not meant to be a real test for whether an AI was actually intelligent.

The point of the test was essentially this: If a machine becomes able to imitate intelligence well enough that we can't tell the difference, then we may as well treat it as actual intelligence. As much anything, Turing was making a philosophical point from a pragmatic point of view. It doesn't make sense to ask whether a machine is "actually intelligent", but only whether it's capable of behaving as though it has intelligence.

So it's not really about fooling a certain specific percentage of people, or having the test go on for a specific point of time. Those are just issues of how you might hypothetically conduct an actual test, but what you're testing for is whether the effects of the machine "intelligence" have reached a level of being indistinguishable from human intelligence.

So really, the point was to have something like a "blind taste test". You say you can tell the difference between Coke and Pepsi, but if I pour Coke and Pepsi into identically glasses, can you tell the difference? If not, then maybe you shouldn't express a preference. Similarly, if I can put a series of questions to a person and a computer, and no matter what questions I ask, I can't tell the human's responses from the computer's responses, then maybe we shouldn't think that the computer is less intelligent than the human.

Re:Turing test not passed.

[Agent0013]

There's been a movement recently suggesting that true AI can only exist in an embodied system. I initially thought that was bollocks, but the more I think about it the more it makes sense. You may be able to make a machine with the capacity to learn as well as a human, but without a means to "experiment" in the real world how would it ever learn about something like the behaviour of a bucket of water?

I have thought this might be true for a few years now. The human brain starts out not even knowing how to move the limbs it is connected to. It cannot process the visual information it receives. It has to figure everything out from experience with the world by initiating an action and seeing what changes happen to the inputs. And there are millions and millions of input signals coming in every second. From every touch upon the skin when the arm is moved and the nerves that give proprioception to the sense of air movement upon the hair follicles and the vision system seeing the arm move. There is just soo much data coming in that feeds the brain constantly. I think it is quite necessary to have all that for a machine to have intelligence.

Re:Turing test not passed.

[Anonymous Coward]

It isn't limited to teenagers.

Re:Turing test not passed.

[Anonymous Coward]

A program that is 100% honest is not AI in the Turing sense. It may be better than humans at certain tasks, but it does not emulate human intelligence, because humans lie all the time.

Re:Turing test not passed.

[gstoddart]

That's because they keep shifting the goalposts.

This isn't "shifting" the goal posts. This is trying to actually come up with a meaningful metric for computer intelligence.

And the test which everyone was up in arms about was definitely not an indicator of computer intelligence, but narrowly defining the test in such a way as to make it look like they'd achieved it.

Their test was Can a computer program pretending to be a child speaking it's non-native language fool people, but it sure as hell wasn't a valid measure of how well we're doing with machine intelligence.

Re:Turing test not passed.

[ShanghaiBill]

"What is intelligence?"

Intelligence is the ability to formulate an effective initial response to a novel situation.

"Formulate" is important, because intelligence is thinking not acting. "Initial response" is important, to rule out simply cycling through every possible response by trial and error. And "novel" is important, because intelligence is more than just remembering what you did last time.

Re:Turing test not passed.

[TangoMargarine]

Programming a computer to lie and be evasive about its nature is easy, and many chatbots can already do that.

This sounds very dubious.

A) A computer can only lie if it has a sense of truth, can't it? Lying implies that you know what the truth is an purposely state the opposite. Mistakenly convening the wrong information is not lying.

B) Regurgitating responses that were pre-programmed to be incorrect does not fit my definition of "lying." Programming a computer to give an incorrect response is ordering it to do so, so you're telling it to lie, which it obediently does. What would be far more philosophically interesting was if you told it to lie and it *didn't.* Now THAT would be a good indication of intelligence (although it's a bit hairsplitting).

Re:Turing test not passed.

[TangoMargarine]

*what the truth is and purposely
*Mistakenly conveying the wrong

Blargh.

Re:Turing test not passed.

[fabrica64]

I guess it can be described differently. As computers are deterministic, true AI is when a computer behaves in a not deterministic manner. Actually no computer has intelligence because given the same input, they give the same results.

Re:Turing test not passed.

[Anonymous Coward]

Programming a computer to lie and be evasive about its nature is easy

You're completely missing my point: if we start with an AI that cannot lie, then it will not pass the Turing test. So the Turing test is not definitive for what encompasses AI.

You say that a bot can easily be programmed to lie, that's true. But what if you have the artificial equivalent of a human brain? Do you know what artificial neurons to tweak to make it a liar?

But that's besides the point: if we have to reprogram the AI to make it pass the Turing test, then that's no longer the same AI.

Re:Turing test not passed.

[Anonymous Coward]

There is nothing to stop the human comparison from lying and saying he was a computer as well.

Then I'd ask them what the square root is of pi to 100 decimal places, and see the human computer go silent while they fumble with their calculator. Even if the AI was bad at math, there would be some question that you could ask it, that it would answer in a non-human way.

If it got so perfect that it would seem human in every way, I'd no longer call it artificial.

Re:Turing test not passed.

[14erCleaner]

So now anything we understand is not intelligence???

When I was in grad school back in the 80's, I knew a guy who was researching AI. He complained that as soon as some technique was understood, people would say it wasn't AI any more, so as a result the AI profession as a whole never got much credit for advancing.

Re:Turing test not passed.

[blue trane]

Sure, and McCarthy's Advice Taker is basically implemented in driving direction programs.

dwarf fortress

[Anonymous Coward]

That is all.

Re:dwarf fortress

[Horshu]

I first heard about it this morning on this site. Holy crap! I'm tempted to try it but am almost afraid to try it.

Re:dwarf fortress

[Draugo]

Don't be, it's not nearly as difficult to get into as it's reputation states (somewhat like Dark Souls in that respect in fact). Just read some getting started tutorials from the dwarf fortress wiki and play. The most used keyboard shortcuts are no more difficult to learn than shortcuts in any other program and DF always displays all available key commands anyway (although in some menus you might need to scroll). It's great fun even if you don't get all the complexities. It's somewhat like The Sims on steroids.

Re:dwarf fortress

[Anonymous Coward]

I suggest you either wait a few weeks for bug fixes and nice mods, or use the previous version. Or if you use the last release, save often: it crashes a lot.

Re:dwarf fortress

[bughunter]

Emergent behavior may be necessary for creativity, but is not sufficient.

Most humans couldn't pass that test

[voss]

When was the last time the average person created something original?

Re:Most humans couldn't pass that test

[retchdog]

and there are quite a few human pairs for which one would not be able to convince the other that they were speaking intelligibly, either.

it is irrelevant. it is only necessary for one computer (however that's defined) to pass this test. i don't see how it's really any better than Turing though. it's a nice idea, it seems even more vague than the Turing test.

Re:Most humans couldn't pass that test

[Lisias]

People usually make the big mistake of taking himselfs as measure for everybody else.

Turing was a hell of a smart guy - I bet my mouse that he had this mindset ("everybody is more or less smart as me") when he designed that Test.

By the way, there's a joke around here that states: The sum of all Q.I. in the Earth is a constant - and the population is growing...

There's more instructed people nowadays, but smart? I'm afraid that not - Turing didn't live to see what we are nowadays.

Re:Most humans couldn't pass that test

[mi]

Well, it does happen every day here and there. But there are a lot of people, who never manage to — throughout their whole lives... And I'm not even sure about myself, unfortunately.

Re:Most humans couldn't pass that test

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to mention being original or not is a bad test of something being "good". From art to science humans build on the work of those who came before. The challenge is picking good stuff to incorporate into the new stuff. Humans are sort of a "culture filter" constantly combining good ideas and discarding bad ones. A human with no education is more likely to come up with an "original idea" than someone with a classical education, and the resulting "original idea" will probably be a bad idea.

Re:Most humans couldn't pass that test

[Anonymous Coward]

That last line of the summary isn't a great wrap up -- its not something original needs to be produced, its that you cannot have an explanation for where it came from. When I ask you to hum 3 notes, you may choose part of a song or not produce something original but your reason for choosing those 3 notes was because its what came to mind. If a program is designed to choose 3 random notes when asked to hum, that's not AI because you can explain why. Until the designers only explanation is "because you asked it to" it doesn't pass the test regardless of originality.

Re:Most humans couldn't pass that test

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't necessarily agree with your statement. I have 'invented' many things throughout my years, but very few are original ideas. That does not mean I have not thought of something "new." I have, without knowledge of what others were doing or prior directed reading, 'invented' directional sound projection devices, the idea of scarcity, the terrible concept of roller wheels in shoes, Newtonian-fluid body armor, dropping rods of metal from space as a weapon, etc. Just because I was not at the cutting edge does not mean that new concepts don't exist....unless, of course, you are talking about literature, in which case, yeah, there hasn't been anything new since Sophocles, and even that is most likely just because of documentation. Point is, a computer doesn't have to create a "NEW" idea, only one which it couldn't have thought up through it's direct programming and design. Good idea, bad idea, it shouldn't matter. My personal opinion: emotion is a necessary requirement, along with logic, for creativity and thus A.I.

Re:Most humans couldn't pass that test

[sg_oneill]

When was the last time the average person created something original?

Probably every day, BUT it does go to the point with this one. We're still trying to recreate an idealized human rather than actually focusing on what intelligence is.

My cat is undeniably intelligent, almost certainly sentient although probably not particularly sapient. She works out things for herself and regularly astonishes me with the stuff she works out, and her absolute cunning when when she's hunting mice. In fact having recently worked out I get unhappy when she brings mice from outside the house and into my room, she now brings them into the back-room and leaves them in her food bowl, despite me never having told her that that would be an accepatble place for her to place her snacks.

But has she created an original work? Well no, other than perhaps artfully diabolical new ways to smash mice. But thats something she's programmed to do. She is, after all, a cat.

She'd fail the test, but she's probably vastly more intelligent in the properly philosophical meaning of the term, than any machine devised to date.

Re:Most humans couldn't pass that test

[jimmydevice]

If it came up with the most efficient / fastest sort and search algorithms I might be impressed. It's still not intelligence.

Re:Most humans couldn't pass that test

[TWX]

Has anyone really been far even as decided to use even go want to do look more like?

Re:Most humans couldn't pass that test

[TapeCutter]

You and I are constantly having original thoughts while walking and chewing gum at the same time, thing is they not impressive enough to be called "original". The test in TFA just extends the psychologically comforting idea that intelligence is something unique to higher life forms, yet when I was at school in the 60's intelligence was generally considered to be unique to humans, animals were generally considered to be instinctual automata, which likely explains why Turing defined AI as the ability to hold a human conversation.

Re:Most humans couldn't pass that test

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't look now but math is quickly becoming the new chess. There's a reason there are no child prodigies in sociology.

(In the future machine intelligence will "discover" and prove more theorems than human mathematicians. However, since machines are no more interested in math than they are in chess, real mathematicians will still be around, doing something more obviously philosophy than "math" (not that math hasn't always been pure thought, but not as obviously so as it'll become), GUIDING the machines. But this will be the case for every AI. It's going to be a symbiosis. There's no reason machines have to be original or conscious or whatever in order to completely dominate intellectual works. All it requires is a few humans to ask them the right questions. These AI debates are stupid. Machines are machines. They're not curious. They don't want to learn. None of that stuff we recognize in us applies to them because they were created, whereas we evolved intelligent behaviors and traits like curiosity in order to survive.)

Re:Most humans couldn't pass that test

[lorinc]

The most ridicule part being "must not be able to explain how". That doesn't even make sense for humans! If you ask artists, they'll tell you what their influences are, if you ask critics, they'll tell you why this particular piece of art was made this way and not in a completely different manner.

Fun fact: any program with yet unseen bugs that make their behavior totally unexplainable to their developers has passed the test. That gives you either an idea of the soundness of this crap, or a deep insight of what type of failure humankind is.

Re:Most humans couldn't pass that test

[HornWumpus]

I invented the soleless shoe. To fool the PHB and let me walk around the cube farm, almost barefoot.

My life's ambition (yet unfulfilled) is to invent a new crime. You'll hear about it and say: 'that has to be illegal'...Not as easy as it sounds. Damn 'Computer Fraud and Abuse Act' makes anything remotely related to a computer, that a federal judge doesn't like, a retroactive crime.

So the best I've got is giving dangerous advice on the 'net. BTW did you all know that you can make a miracle cleaning fluid by mixing bleach and ammonia? You're going to want a lot, so get the two largest bottles you can find.

You should run your car with brake bleeders open once a year. Preventive maintenance.

No money in that.

Re:Most humans couldn't pass that test

[HornWumpus]

Philosopher #1: Why didn't we think of that?

Philosopher #2: Minds must be too highly trained.

Re:Most humans couldn't pass that test

[Anonymous Coward]

Like the idiots behind the Turing Test?

I'm at a lose as to why this is even a problem? Anyone that reads how the Turing Test was set-up should have figured it was bullshit, and a new standard should have been in place before long before the Turing Test was laughable considered the standard.

Nothing against the man that inspired it, or the people that passed a defunct test. But it shows me you have idiots that set standards and dont bother to scrutinize how easy they are to cheat! Their so desperate to honor someone that their own arrogance allows this to happen. I'm pointing at /. editors who somehow thought the Turing Test was something noteworthy then looked like jackasses for raving on and on over it.

Re:Most humans couldn't pass that test

[Anonymous Coward]

You just did...

Re:Most humans couldn't pass that test

[Anonymous Coward]

Brute forcing something is not the same as being creative... Essentially that's how computers beat chess players: brute force statistics

Re:Most humans couldn't pass that test

[serviscope_minor]

My cat is undeniably intelligent, almost certainly sentient although probably not particularly sapient.

I'm not sure. They're certainly capable of wnat appears to be calculated decisions based on what they believe your mental state to be.

For example:

Cat I used to live with loved scratching the sofa. He knew he wasn't allowed to and I could tell because he'd flee whenever I saw him at it.

One day was pestering to be let out of a room and I managed to whack him right in the face with the door. His response was to walk slowly over to the sofa look right at me and then scratch it really slowly while holding my gaze.

This sort of behaviour---doing something they know you don't like in response to you doing something they don't like is not uncommon among cats and many people will report similar things.

Re:Most humans couldn't pass that test

[jrumney]

When was the last time the average person created something original?

People create random original things all the time. It's the hardware fluke bar they'd have trouble passing.

Re:Most humans couldn't pass that test

[gurps_npc]

How many people have children? OK, I will give you that one- you could claim that all life is 'programmed' to reproduce.

How many people sing in the shower?

How many people doodle?

Re:Most humans couldn't pass that test

[sociocapitalist]

When was the last time the average person created something original?

Every minute of every day, somewhere around the world. Just go into a kindergarten classroom and look at the art from the kids.

Re:Most humans couldn't pass that test

[StikyPad]

To be fair to the GP, the output of any human is predictable and explainable if we accept determinism. The only way the Lovelace Test can be valid is if we accept that people have souls (or some other attribute not subject to physical law) that in some way affect natural brain function, and find a way to reproduce that artificially.

Indeed, the whole idea of "unpredictable, unexplainable output" seems contradictory. When people do not behave somewhat predictably, when we cannot explain their actions, we typically label them as crazy. Intelligent actions are not inexplicable after analysis, even if they appear to be in the moment. The only way to satisfy that condition is to generate random output, which is the opposite of intelligence.

Re:Most humans couldn't pass that test

[CAOgdin]

Define "original" with some precision, please.

Re:Most humans couldn't pass that test

[Anonymous Coward]

before grade school

Re:Most humans couldn't pass that test

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it actually possible to create anything original?

Re:Most humans couldn't pass that test

[retchdog]

Yes.

Re:Most humans couldn't pass that test

[jfengel]

To me, this seems to cut to the heart of it. AI is commonly conceived of as trying to mimic human intelligence, while there are cognitive tasks that cats and even mice can do that prove too hard for computers. A cat can recognize a mouse with essentially 100% accuracy, from any angle, in an eyeblink. No computer would come close, and the program that came closest wouldn't be a general-purpose object matcher.

Vertebrate brains are pretty remarkable. Human brains are an amazing extra step on top of that. We don't know exactly what that is in part because we don't really understand the simpler vertebrate brains. IMHO, we won't have a good mimic for sapience until we've gotten it to first do sentience. We don't have to rigorously follow the evolutionary order, but it seems to me that conversation-based tests are rewarding the wrong features, and even if they get better by that definition they're not getting us any closer to the actual goals of understanding (and reproducing) intelligence.

Re:Most humans couldn't pass that test

[Anonymous Coward]

Quotient Intelligence?

Re:Most humans couldn't pass that test

[Anonymous Coward]

When was the last time the average person created something original?

When they were kids prior to the system beating the creativity out of them.

Re:Most humans couldn't pass that test

[Lisias]

whoops....

I.Q. :-)

Re:Most humans couldn't pass that test

[Anonymous Coward]

Almost every human has passed this test already!

I am 99.99% sure that most parents can not explain how/why their creations (children) created the "original" .

Originality should not be limited to whether or not something similar was already created.

Re:Most humans couldn't pass that test

[sg_oneill]

One day was pestering to be let out of a room and I managed to whack him right in the face with the door. His response was to walk slowly over to the sofa look right at me and then scratch it really slowly while holding my gaze.

Mine did even worse once. She normally sleeps on the end of my bed. One night however I had a girlfriend stay over the night and the cat got a bit upset when she threw the cat off the bed. So she went out into the hallway, pulled all my girlfriends clothes out of her bag and strew them up and down the hallway. Then *pissed on them*. First time she's peed inside since she was a kitten.

That was a pretty strong message I suspect.,

The machine's designers?

[Anonymous Coward]

Shouldn't it be "nobody can be able to explain how their original code led to this new program", instead of
  "The machine's designers must not be able to explain how their original code led to this new program"?

Re:The machine's designers?

[Anonymous Coward]

well, explaining AI creativity would be easy... ``the system has a random path generator, evaluates each path based on such and such criteria, uses genetic algorithms to improve the path, and after a while outputs the surviving path, in this case it's this short poem...'' or something along these lines. So the designers have no idea why that particular poem was selected, but they sure understand the process.

Re:The machine's designers?

[wish]

Possibility 1: It does mean the designers in which case some machines may get promoted to AI shortly after their designers die.
Possibility 2: It means anyone with access to the design in which case if the AI has capabilities beyond ours then one 'AI' may be able to explain the creative process of another in sufficient detail to preclude any of them being classed as AI. This test appears to assume human limitations. While we may one day understand enough neuroscience to explain human creativity in a hand-wavy fashion I doubt we'll ever get to the point where a human can explain another human's creative process in detail.

Another thought. Would adding a genuine random element make this test rather easy to pass? While a designer might be able to provide an explanation for a given creative work they could never guarantee it was the correct explanation. If the requirement is that nobody can provide a plausible explanation for the creative work then humans might not pass the test.

 

Lovelace Test

[Anonymous Coward]

...you keep using that test...I do not think it tests what you think it does....

Re:Lovelace Test

[sjames]

How do regurgitated one-lines make you feel?

Re:Lovelace Test

[Anonymous Coward]

squishy

Re:Lovelace Test

[Anonymous Coward]

Makes me hard

Humans don't create original work

[Anonymous Coward]

We observe nature and imitate. Unless opium is involved in creating a randomization of that observation.

Wild Wild West or Deep Throat?

[Anonymous Coward]

I ponder the choices.

Absurd

[mark-t]

The machine's designers must not be able to explain how their original code led to this new program

That is a flatly ludicrous requirement, far in excess of what we would ever even consider applying to determine if even a human being is intelligent or not. Hell, if you were to apply that standard to human beings, ironically, many extremely intelligent people would fail that metric, because in hindsight, you can very often identify precisely how a particular thought or idea came out of a person.

Re:Absurd

[Roger W Moore]

Agreed - there is no reason to require the program be written in perl.

Re:Absurd

[khallow]

The machine's designers must not be able to explain how their original code led to this new program

That is a flatly ludicrous requirement

Why do you think that? I guess we need actual examples.

Re:Absurd

[Livius]

And if it's declared intelligent, and then someone figures out how to explain how it came up with whatever the original content is, then does it just become less intelligent?

Re:Absurd

[Anonymous Coward]

The human "machine's designer" would most likely be their parents. So your parents must be able to explain how you come up with that idea. I am pretty sure mine would just stare at the question even if asked something completly trivial about my work ...

Re:Absurd

[Twinbee]

When AI comes up with what you just said, one can say the Turing test has been passed in every conceivable sense :)

Re:Absurd

[Anonymous Coward]

Hasn't this already been accomplished in a way? There's a program called Eureka that has been used to analyze things (all sorts of things), it was hooked up to a webcam for example to watch a double pendulum and from watching it came up with F=MA on its own without any explicit knowledge of physics. It was in a radiolab broadcast: http://www.radiolab.org/story/91712-limits-of-science/ . The most interesting part was where it analyzed a bunch of biological data and came up with 2 formulas that described the actions of a type of cell. It could even predict what the cell would do next. The biologists however ended up in a situation where they have these formulas that work but can't publish because they can't explain why they work. To my mind that's exactly what the lovelace test describes.

The Turing Test has NOT been PASSED!

[IQGQNAU]

The only people fooled by Goostman's PR BS are the press and their gullible readers.

Turing Test Today and in the Future

[Anonymous Coward]

artificial-intelligence.com/comic/4

How many humans can truly pass this test?

[Anonymous Coward]

How many humans can truly pass this test?

Mostly we're 7 billion 'somewhat intelligent' monkeys combinitorally iterating over ideas and observations that have become cultural knowledge.

I could go for some rigorous Lovelace testing

[Anonymous Coward]

As in "Deep Throat"

Evolutionary algorithms

[The Evil Atheist]

I do recall reading a while back experiments done with AI in which programs compete for resources by generating programs to do tasks given to it (computing sums etc). Some programs did generate code that were completely unexpected.

It raises the question programs that are evolved are designed by the programmer or the program, or the process of evolution. And it also raises the philosophical question about whether we should be more humble and accept that our "creativity" that we think is what makes humans intelligent could be nothing more than a process of the evolution of ideas (I hesitate to use the word meme) that we don't actually originate nor control.

If we consider programs that can create things through evolution as "intelligent", that would ironically make natural selection intelligent, since DNA is a digital program that is evolved into complex things over time that can't be reduced to first principles.

Re:Evolutionary algorithms

[Anonymous Coward]

But evolution's more like brute forcing efficiency/fitness/adaptability.

So a random number generator or even an empty storage device decaying by radiation eventually producing a snippet that makes sense would be called intelligent.
Million monkeys & shakespear?

Re:Evolutionary algorithms

[Anonymous Coward]

You're making a fairly big semantic error here. Programs are designed iteratively by programmers. That's the MECHANISM. The overall PROCESS is evolution. There's no dichotomy here - mechanism and process are two different things. Organic evolution occurs because of randomness modulated by the epigenetic landscape which defines fitness. Program evolution done by "creativity" is non-random, and tries to improve fitness. If each attempt in natural selection is random, each attempt in creativity is guided by intelligence. This makes programs evolve way faster than organisms do (per attempt), and it's the improved mechanism that causes this, so sure the individuals who introduce a successful mutation to a program can feel proud, because they meant to do that. They can also justifiably feel "more intelligent" than a natural random process. So if you want to argue that natural evolution is "intelligent" then I'd say it's intelligence 0.0, and I'd want to rank intelligence by "how much faster than selecting from random attempts is this evolutionary mechanism". So Deep Blue would get say 0.001, because it's just making billions of attempts and picking the best one. But a programmer who can add a feature to a program first time gets a much higher ranking.

Re:Evolutionary algorithms

[Anonymous Coward]

It's highly doubtful "intelligence" has intrinsic worth anyways.

Consider all our arguments back and forth. Everybody will probably agree that there is display of intelligence, however, only a few posts provide some insight, and every insight will only be individually valueable. The same text might even mean completely different things for each reader and the writer!

There's something more valuable than intelligence, because completely alone, it has absolutely no intrinsic value. Indeed, intelligence without context, "a world" in which to function, has no basis. But even with that, without goals, desire and destiny, there's really no point to it!

Goal Post: Mysticism

[Altanar]

The machine's designers must not be able to explain how their original code led to this new program.

Whoa, whoa, whoa. I have severe problem with this. This is like looking at obscurity and declaring it a soul. The measure of intelligence is that we can't understand it? Intelligence through obfuscation? There should be no way for a designer to not be able to figure out why their machine produced what it did given enough debugging.

Re:Goal Post: Mysticism

[ornil]

The way I interpret the test is that the output must not be intended to be produced by some pre-programmed process. Not that you couldn't debug it which would obviously be impossible on anything short of a quantum computer.

On the other hand, I claim that if I train a neural network on some sheet music, it would be able to produce a new melody. And that melody would not be in any way pre-programmed (like a child learning from experience is not pre-programmed), and it will be original. Where can I collect my prize?

Re:Goal Post: Mysticism

[K. S. Kyosuke]

There should be no way for a designer to not be able to figure out why their machine produced what it did given enough debugging.

Well...

Re:Goal Post: Mysticism

[The Evil Atheist]

Unless the panel of judges is a bunch of hipsters who will always say it sounds derivative.

Re:Goal Post: Mysticism

[Anonymous Coward]

Not if they heard it before it was cool, then the AI just sold out.

Re:Goal Post: Mysticism

[dbIII]

This is like looking at obscurity and declaring it a soul

That's the undergraduate view of AI that gets repeated at times in this place.

The measure of intelligence is that we can't understand it?

Not just yet, so instead of waiting until years of work is done understanding the physical basis of thought the impatient want some sort of measure now.

Re:Goal Post: Mysticism

[Anonymous Coward]

I had similar reaction to yours, but then I realized that this criteria is basically met by artificial neural network. They are designed, we know why they work and can prove mathematically that they have tendency to converge on solution. But once a solution is learned, it may be difficult to explain how that particular NN does what it does, since it is basically emergent behavior of many simple perceptions (or other models).

Re:Goal Post: Mysticism

[Anonymous Coward]

Very true - take my wife for instance: nobody has a clue whats going on and you cant say she is intelligent.
When you ask her you get the standard ELIZA answer: "If you don't know there is no point to explain it to you". I'm having doubts she would pass the Turing test ...

Re:Goal Post: Mysticism

[Anonymous Coward]

There should be no way for a designer to not be able to figure out why their machine produced what it did given enough debugging.

Human hubris is so touching. But you puny Earthlings know about Chaos Theory, right? And Incompleteness? I love this century because your race puts so much effort into mechanical programming. Press this button, event happens here, event caught here, action occurs. Nice cause-and-effect model; Newton would be proud. And yet even within this model you can easily create systems which cannot be modelled except by running the system. How does your debugger help here? Saying these steps occurred therefore these outputs were produced is not an explanation, it's a description.

Re:Goal Post: Mysticism

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.

-- Stephen Hawking

Same thing applies to anyone else who demands answers without understanding. The ability to let go and withhold judgement is beyond most people.

Humans fail this

[Anonymous Coward]

With some basis statistics, physics, chemistry and eventually some evolutionary psychology, I can explain how they came up with this test based on the original input (a bunch of hydrogen and some time).

Also, I've made programs that passed this test at least as much as I pass the test. Any program with bugs I can't figure out qualifies (I work in graphics, bugs = modernist paintings in a lot of cases).

I've also had such things happen when playing with fractal rendering algorithms: I write up some interesting algorithm, and get some new unexpected output. Usually I can figure it out eventually, but if I can't then its intelligent?

If my computer blue screens and even Microsoft can't understand why, its intelligent?

Even basic neural networks solve non-interesting problems in whats we don't really understand. We know how it got there (physics) but not the real source of the emergent behavior.

The definition present here is just useless: its open to interpretation so much so that it could include basically everything or nothing.

Frustration

[Anonymous Coward]

Computers create it every single day.

Most of the programs I write...

[RobertJ1729]

Most of the programs I write produce stuff I can't explain.

If it's as easy as that "Turing Test" was...

[Quinn_Inuit]

...then all the computer will have to do is string together a series of random English words till it puts together something that sounds like a short story written by a Hungarian first-grader for whom English is a second language.

I don't care what they call the test. It's useless if the grading rubric is rigged to allow any idiot to write something that passes. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go see if I can talk ELIZA into writing me something that would function as an epistolary novel.

Already happened?

[K. S. Kyosuke]

The machine's designers must not be able to explain how their original code led to this new program.

If I'm not mistaken, this has already happened when evolutionary algorithms were applied to hardware design: some slides. The author of the program has no idea how the resulting circuit worked.

Re:Already happened?

[geekoid]

It's actual happened a lot, it's called 'emergent behavior'. The paper is old, poorly thought out, and written by people who want other people to think that are smart, but aren't actually smart enough to do science, you know: philosophers.

remember kids: philosophers are to science what homeopaths are to medicine.

Re:Already happened?

[K. S. Kyosuke]

I know what emergent behavior is, I was merely making the point that it has already been observed in software systems and that it (at least from my POV) satisfies these requirements. (And what exactly is poorly thought out about Thompson's research?)

Re:Already happened?

[Culture20]

people who want other people to think that are smart, but aren't actually smart enough to do science, you know: philosophers.

remember kids: philosophers are to science what homeopaths are to medicine.

And also remember that anyone with a Ph.D. in a science field isn't a scientist. They're a doctor of philosophy. Without philosophy, science doesn't exist.

Re:Already happened?

[The Evil Atheist]

Without science, philosophy is useless. Philosophers have a bad habit of treating things as binary true or false and statistical answers are not acceptable. No philosopher I know has made any sense of Quantum Mechanics or natural selection so far and are completely beholden to science in modern times. The only philosophy that's worth pursuing these days is the philosophy of science itself, but even that is hitting its limits. I've been in too many debates where philosophers try to label science as "logical positivism" or some other ridiculous mischaracterization. Even science must now be looked at under a scientific lens and figure out what science actually is by looking at what scientists actually do rather than imposing philosophical strawmen.

Re:Already happened?

[Culture20]

Without science, philosophy is useless.

Philosophy created science without science's help.

Re:Already happened?

[Anonymous Coward]

At best it codified science, but people were doing research well before spoken language.

Re:Already happened?

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Are you sure about that? I thought we were pretty sure that human speech is virtually required for any advanced cognition, at least for anything one would call "research".

Re:Already happened?

[The Evil Atheist]

Bollocks.

Science was created because philosophy couldn't cut it. Galileo didn't bother trying to figure out the philosophical underpinnings of things rolling down planks or pendulum swings or the moons of Jupiter. He went straight to observations.

Re:Already happened?

[The Evil Atheist]

Except "human speech" can be anything. Complex language started out simple and people were experimenting then as well. Learning how to make fire and tools requires experimentation that would approach what we would call research.

Re:Already happened?

[Culture20]

The process commonly known as the scientific method is the product of philosophy, and science and the scientific method had nothing to do with the scientific method's birth.

Re:Already happened?

[The Evil Atheist]

Again, bollocks.

First, there is no "Scientific Method", with capital letters. There have been many philosophical attempts at trying to formally define science, but none are accurate and often fly in the face of how science is actually done.

If science doesn't exist before attempts to formalize science, then you are saying that Galileo wasn't doing science. The practice came before the theory and is a recorded historical fact. You demonstrate precisely the problem with philosophers - the theory overrides facts. Science also continues to evolve outside of the philosophical boundaries philosophers try to impose on science.

One can only assume these attempts by philosophers trying to pull rank on science because of supposed priority is the twitchings of a dead body.

Science is an EVOLVING discipline and philosophers can only formally define science insofar as there are established practices to begin with. On the frontiers of science where we're still trying to figure out how to do science, no philosopher has ever created a definition that ever satisfies those practices that are just beginning to be fleshed out.

Re:Already happened?

[Your.Master]

There's nothing greater than a semantic argument on slashdot.

Arguing whether science is a form of philosophy is like arguing whether the Game of Thrones TV show is an example of art. You don't necessarily have any disagreement about what science is (even though that's what everybody is focussing on); you have a disagreement on the definition of philosophy (which, like art, is notoriously hard to pin down).

Re:Already happened?

[The Evil Atheist]

You mischaracterize the debate. The debate is not about what either of those is, but whether science comes from philosophy, or developed as a complement/reaction to philosophy that has now far exceeded philosophy's capabilities. The corollary to that debate is the argument that if philosophy gave birth to science, whether philosophy is allowed to "pull rank" on science any time they hit a wall and claim credit for things as though science "owes" anything to philosophy for its existence. As though because there's a perpetual licencing agreement for science to pay or otherwise the philosophers will get angry and try to shut it down.

Re:Already happened?

[Anonymous Coward]

You know that science used to be called natural philosophy, right?

“There is no such thing as philosophy-free science; there is only science whose philosophical baggage is taken on board without examination."
—Daniel Dennett

Re:Already happened?

[oodaloop]

Also, I remember when Deep Blue was playing Kasparov, the IBM programmers had no idea why it was playing the way it was. It was coming up with strategies that the programmers did not anticipate.

Re:Already happened?

[StikyPad]

I think you're mischaracterizing both philosophy and science. If we accept the definition of philosophy as "the study of the fundamental nature of knowledge, reality, and existence" then most sciences are a subset of philosophy. And simply because there is a hierarchal structure to their categorization or origins does not give one authority over the other, any more than the first mammal has authority over lions. Neither do we say that lions have "far exceeded" the limits of mammals. Arguments that pit philosophy against science are just as nonsensical.

Re:Already happened?

[The Evil Atheist]

I don't accept that definition of philosophy, so no. If that is philosophy, then nothing isn't philosophy, making it a meaningless term. I don't care for definitions. All that matters is how they arose and how they're actually practiced.

I'm not the one arguing for any authority over the other. I'm pointing out the attitude of some philosophers towards science as a junior form of philosophy when it isn't and probably never was. When humans were learning how to farm, they were doing proto-scientific research and they probably couldn't care less about the "big questions" or the "nature of things".

The process of observation and working out what is happening is not in itself philosophy. It's something every human does since birth.

Re:Already happened?

[Anonymous Coward]

Your are correct as the researcher's training starts from the PhD. Most people call it post-doc.

Re:Already happened?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sadly, it's difficult to reproduce or extend Adrian Thompson's research now, because today's FPGAs don't allow arbitrary configuration strings (at least, there's no guarantee that it wouldn't burn out the FPGA). That specific FPGA model was well-suited for their research, but Xilinx discontinued it not long after.

Re:Already happened?

[gordo3000]

don't try to argue with a humanities major. all they have is the belief they can pull rank in some theoretical world. Leave them that, it's all they will ever have while scientists are actually out there contributing to the body of human knowledge.

Re:Already happened?

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't like something, so you ignore its definition. YOU are the definition of a tool.

Re:Already happened?

[AthanasiusKircher]

All that matters is how they arose and how they're actually practiced.

If that's true, then your argument so far has been ill-informed. Historically, what Galileo and Newton and other "scientists" in the 17th-century called their work was not "science" but rather "natural philosophy." And the reason they called it that was because it came out of a long philosophical tradition, which was in the process of evolving under the work of a number of scientist-philosophers like Mersenne, Descartes, etc. who was seen at the time as leading the real intellectual "revolution." (The "scientific revolution" was something basically made up in the 1800s and projected back on the 1600s -- at the time, what Galileo, Newton, et al. were seen as doing was participating in a larger intellectual revolution in "philosophy.")

As for how things are practiced, well there are in fact scholars who work on philosophy of science, and some of their ideas have been influential in changing the way scientists conceive of their methodologies, even in the past century. People around here tend to like Popper, but there were people before him, and generations after him (Kuhn, Lakatos, etc.). The way we teach the "scientific method" in grade school is essentially the distillation of a particular philosophical conception of science developed in the 1800s, perhaps modified by some of the stuff like Popper that was formulated in the first half of the 20th century.

I'm not trying to overstate the influence of philosophy here, but modern science actually did develop out of a branch of philosophy. And it's only in the past 50 years or so that practicing scientists stopped having a detailed acquaintance with ongoing philosophical debates about scientific methodologies.

I'm not the one arguing for any authority over the other. I'm pointing out the attitude of some philosophers towards science as a junior form of philosophy when it isn't and probably never was.

Science isn't a "junior form of philosophy," and I do think you are right to criticize people who have said so. But science does have particular philosophical assumptions at its core, which were historically developed often by people with more than a passing familiarity with philosophical debates. Modern philosophy is still concerned with underlying assumptions of science that are largely unnoticed by practicing scientists who don't necessarily reflect on problematic elements of their methodology. This is not a criticism of science nor an assertion that it is subservient to anything -- it's just pointing out a different perspective... not unlike the mathematicians who are obsessed with the foundations of analysis and the underlying basis of number systems, which gets into the realm of philosophy. Most of those issues have little bearing on the everyday work of applied mathematicians, but there is a possibility that some research into these assumptions could lead people down a new path.

When humans were learning how to farm, they were doing proto-scientific research and they probably couldn't care less about the "big questions" or the "nature of things".

Are you serious? Of course they cared about the big questions. That's why they created gods and goddesses and personified nature to create explanations for all the "big questions" happening around them. Religion was the first answer.

Philosophy was the first step in introducing self-reflection, rationality, and logical consistency to the investigation of those questions.

The process of observation and working out what is happening is not in itself philosophy. It's something every human does since birth.

Naive empiricism is not the same as philosophy nor science. There's a self-reflective attitude required to begin asking questions about the methodology of observation that led to both philosophical revolutions and ultimately to the scientific revolution (which, depend

Re:Already happened?

[The Evil Atheist]

Historically, what Galileo and Newton and other "scientists" in the 17th-century called their work was not "science" but rather "natural philosophy." And the reason they called it that was because it came out of a long philosophical tradition, which was in the process of evolving under the work of a number of scientist-philosophers like Mersenne, Descartes, etc. who was seen at the time as leading the real intellectual "revolution."

Really? And how often did Newton and Galileo cite philosophers in their works?

As for how things are practiced, well there are in fact scholars who work on philosophy of science

I've never disputed that. But those who work on the philosophy on science can only do so insofar as there are established practices within science. They never touch the frontiers of science, which is arguably where science always is. People can philosophize about science all they want, but science develops independent of what philosophers claim science is. Are you serious? Of course they cared about the big questions. That's why they created gods and goddesses and personified nature to create explanations for all the "big questions" happening around them. Religion was the first answer.

I'm pretty sure agriculture developed before religion. Religion arose after agriculture got sophisticated enough. Mostly due to the fact that there is a stable supply of food and people can sit around more and think. But in the early stages of agriculture, people were experimenting with growing things MORE than they were thinking about the philosophical underpinnings of agriculture. I don't see how you can dispute that. No amount of philosophizing grows crops. Simple as that.

Naive empiricism is not the same as philosophy nor science.

You miss the point. Science evolves from naive empiricism mostly independent of philosophy. Philosophy can talk about the progression from naive empiricism from science, but that doesn't mean it becomes the parent of science. They are just commentators, not originators.

but it did develop out of philosophical debates, and the underlying assumptions are still something to think about.

I find this to be strange reasoning. Just because you can have debates about something from a philosophical standpoint doesn't make it the child of philosophy. Philosophy was APPLIED to science after science evolved into something recognizable. Science's evolution owes its modern form to debate, which is always a part of science and does not require philosophy to grant it such powers.

Re:Already happened?

[nikkipolya]

And not to mention "Continuator" that composes & plays Jazz. And also, the "Painting Fool", that paints beautiful art.

Already been done

[geekoid]

A computer infected with a work and a virus led to them combining into a new program.

It was better and unique.

Re:Already been done

[Tablizer]

Your Freudian slip suggests you need a vacation.

Computer Chess

[JimSadler]

Oddly computer chess programs may already meet this criteria. The programs usually apply a weight or value to a move and a weight and a value to the consequences down stream of the move. But there are times when the consequences are of equal value at some event horizon and random choices must be applied. As a consequence sequences of moves may be made that no human has ever made and the programmer could not really predict either. As machines have gotten more able the event horizon is at a deeper level. But we might reach the point at which only the player playing white can ever hope to win and the player with black may always lose. We are not in danger of a human ever being able to do that unless we alter his brain.

Re: Computer Chess

[eric31415927]

Chess algorithms are a measure of the budding ability of programers.

When you can write a chess algorithm that can beat yourself at chess, ...
(When you can snatch the pebble from my hand, ... [Kung Fu])

Re:Computer Chess

[phantomfive]

lol their test is beaten by a random number generator. Oh well.

Re: Computer Chess

[Anonymous Coward]

But I suck at chess, even a bad algo would probably beat me.

Re:Computer Chess

[Anonymous Coward]

Too bad all number generators are pseudorandom. The right person still knows how it got there...

Re:Computer Chess

[phantomfive]

You can see a random number generator with unpredictable events.

Re:Computer Chess

[Anonymous Coward]

Except for all those true-random random number generators, which use external sources of entropy.

Of course, the right person would need access to that same source, so your point sort of holds :-)

Re:Computer Chess

[91degrees]

I think game playing is a better illustration of AI than chatbots. Good systems need to plan ahead and estimate probabilities on limited data, which have obvious parallels to human cognition.

Re:Computer Chess

[Anonymous Coward]

Computer chess programs certainly do not meet these criteria. The explanation for a computer chess program winning is simple. "It tried a billion possible combinations of moves (and responses to moves, and responses to responses to moves) and it picked the best one". If computer chess is intelligent then so is natural evolution, and suddenly intelligent design makes sense. The point of intelligence is to not have to make those billion attempts before making your move. That's why computer design evolves quicker than cat design.

But we might reach the point at which only the player playing white can ever hope to win and the player with black may always lose. We are not in danger of a human ever being able to do that unless we alter his brain.

Supposition. You're assuming chess is a "white wins" game. That's unknown. You're also assuming that if it's a "white wins" game, then no human can learn the rules required for white to always win. That's also unknown.

Re: Computer Chess

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not sure what you're trying to say. Computers are now better than even the best human player, even Magnus Carlsen could not beat my desktop computer, so I'm pretty sure those computers can beat their programmers.

Re: Computer Chess

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think I like this measurement because it is easily biased by being terrible at chess.

Re:Computer Chess

[Anonymous Coward]

Um, no, they're not... unless you think quantum effects are deterministic, in which case you'll need to provide some evidence to back up that claim.

Re:Computer Chess

[Zontar_Thing_From_Ve]

Oddly computer chess programs may already meet this criteria. The programs usually apply a weight or value to a move and a weight and a value to the consequences down stream of the move. But there are times when the consequences are of equal value at some event horizon and random choices must be applied. As a consequence sequences of moves may be made that no human has ever made and the programmer could not really predict either. As machines have gotten more able the event horizon is at a deeper level. But we might reach the point at which only the player playing white can ever hope to win and the player with black may always lose. We are not in danger of a human ever being able to do that unless we alter his brain.

I disagree with your conclusions about computer chess, although you are quite right that it seems unlikely that if chess is ever "solved" (this is the correct term for what you talk about) so that the white player can always force a win that humans will be capable of remembering the data required to always force a win. And chess is a theoretically solvable game.

Computer chess at the highest levels like Deep Blue is little more than a highly specialized data base lookup. The laws of chess require you to have to make a move within time constraints, so if the program can't pick between equally good choices, it would have to rely on some kind of random choice that the programmer would have allowed for (ie. use a random number generator or pick the line likely to result in more exchange of material, etc.). In the early days of computing it was thought that for computers to get really good at chess, they would have to be able to use some kind of AI, but damn IBM for realizing that they could cheat and simply throw massive amounts of processors, computer memory and massive databases of moves at the problem rather than having to actually do real AI work for computers to beat humans at it. That Deep Thought is just a variation on Deep Blue where it's really good at searching through databases of stored information rather than being able to actually do any real kind of AI work. Basically Deep Blue and Deep Thought are brute forcing a solution through technology rather than actually breaking any kind of AI ground, although they may have some really cool and nifty search algorithms to do the job that others lack.

Yes, it's certainly possible for any chess game to get "out of book" and get a sequence of moves where the outcome isn't known, but that can easily by handled by programming approaches that have existed for decades. For example, a program may look to see if the opponent has left a piece undefended by mistake and simply grab it if it doesn't seem to be a deliberate sacrifice (ie. "If I take piece A, will that leave me vulnerable to a next move attack by a different piece?"), you can try to simply exchange material, evaluate positional strength and play to that (ie. "I'm strong on the king side and my opponent is weak there, so I'll push for a king side attack") and so on. These kinds of approaches have been in the best computer chess programs for decades now and there's nothing novel about them.

Re:Computer Chess

[Wescotte]

Are you aware of any games with fixed set of rules/movements that can't use an IBM like strategy (looking up known games combined with brute force) to beat a human? What about games that have rules that can evolve while you play? I assume adding a random element, like having to roll dice, can lead to no win situations for some pretty simply games though.

How many questions can YOU beg in one definition?

[jeffb (2.718)]

What's a "program" ("anything")?

What does it mean to be "engineered to produce" one?

What's a "hardware fluke"?

What constitutes "explanation" of how it was done?

Not. Even. Wrong.

I predict

[Anonymous Coward]

I predict that the Turing test will be passed (truly and officially) well before the Turing test itself will be proven to actually be meaningful.

Lovelace Test

[Anonymous Coward]

You say that as if you are a machine regurgitating prescribed one-liners.

The Lovelace Test :(

[Anonymous Coward]

The Lovelace test should be outlawed as a direct threat to the human species.

Hell, Eliza had me going for a bit.

[Trax3001BBS]

Till it hit me it was looking for keywords to continue on, yes I was new
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E... the Doctor is in...

Monkeys

[Anonymous Coward]

Million Monkeys write Shakespeare method.

Program generates random strings and then puts them into the compiler. When one successfully compiles it has beaten the test but is not what we would call intelligence.

Why I like programming

[mrprogrammerman]

One of the things I love about programming is the moment you have to remind yourself that your program is simply executing algorithms that you told it. Depending on how clever the algorithms are it can appear as if the computer is thinking for itself. Programming allows you to encode intelligence in non-thinking machines.

Re:Why I like programming

[David_Hart]

One of the things I love about programming is the moment you have to remind yourself that your program is simply executing algorithms that you told it. Depending on how clever the algorithms are it can appear as if the computer is thinking for itself. Programming allows you to encode intelligence in non-thinking machines.

No... programming does not encode intelligence in a machine. Intelligence indicates the ability to think for itself and come up with a creative answer that isn't part of it's original programming. When you write a program, all you are doing is telling the computer what to do given a specific input. There is no intelligence involved.

seriously bad test

[bloodhawk]

"The machine's designers must not be able to explain how their original code led to this new program". I know plenty of programmers that can't explain how the hell their code managed to produce certain results, and trust me it has nothing to do with the servers mysteriously developing AI.

The meta-turing test

[swm]

The meta-Turing test counts a thing as intelligent if it seeks to devise and apply Turing tests to objects of its own creation.
--Lew Mammel, Jr.

Re:The meta-turing test

[Anonymous Coward]

wait, isn't that more like a recursive Turing test or something...a meta Turing test would be more like if the thing being Turing tested starts debating the validity of the Turing test to determine intelligence or some shit.

Asimov already covered this...

[dlingman]

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/I... Detective Del Spooner: Human beings have dreams. Even dogs have dreams, but not you, you are just a machine. An imitation of life. Can a robot write a symphony? Can a robot turn a... canvas into a beautiful masterpiece? Sonny: [With genuine interest] Can you?

Re:Asimov already covered this...

[Chris Mattern]

That's not Asimov. It's a film he had nothing to do with that they put one of his titles on for marketing purposes(it bears no resemblence whatsoever to the book). Still a clever piece of dialog, though.

Re:Asimov already covered this...

[Chelloveck]

A film based on a title by Isaac Asimov. See also: Nightfall

Re:Asimov already covered this...

[Chris Mattern]

A film based on a title by Isaac Asimov

Not even that. Just a film with a title by Isaac Asimov pasted on it. The screenplay was already written (the name at that point was "Hardwired") when they decided to buy the title. They changed a few of names to match characters in the book and pasted in a nod to the Three Laws of Robotics. Done!

loopmuch?

[Anonymous Coward]

We do realize that brains are computers, right? AI means intelligent machines designed by intelligent machines. its a 10 goto 10 line

No one is passing the Turing Test

[quantaman]

Just because someone sets some random people up for a five minute interview with a chatbot doesn't mean they're running a Turing Test.

Give people enough time to conduct a proper conversation, hell give them time to ask the chatbot for some original content. Do that and you'll be running a real Turing Test.

The reason you keep hearing about these simplified Turing Tests is those are the only tests people run because those are the only tests computers can pass. But passing a true Turing Test is still a great standard for detecting real AI, and something no one can even approach doing yet.

Computer Chess

[Anonymous Coward]

The programmer of a chess AI knows how it reached where it is. For instance, if it uses minimax the explanation would be along these lines: "on step 1, the evaluation function found x0 for move y0, ... xn for move yn. It selected move yk since no xi is greater than yk." On some cases explaining the behavior may be difficult, but if you spend enough time with traces you'll find the why eventually.

Besides, if simply being unable to explain how the program works makes it intelligent we must be ruled by an AI by now. If only all it took to solve problems was ignorance we'd have run out of problems to solve by now.

Chess no let's play global thermonuclear war

[Joe_Dragon]

what side do you want?

Hypothesis generator plus motivation calculator

[mburns]

Add together a hypothesis generator with a motivation calculator and a theorem prover. This has been shown long since to have the ability to regenerate number theory without further supervision by humans.

must be a black box!

[AndyCanfield]

The great thing about the Turing test was that it was a black box. It did not depend on assumptions about what the designers knew, or what hardware was used, or the like. And so far the only test trials I have heard of have been carefully arranged one on one. Give us a dozen Ukranian teen-agers, and pick the one (or two) which are non-human - that's a better test run.

But, of course, the ultimate test of machine intelligence is when the computer can sue your ass off and win in the Supreme Court.

Which Lovelace?

[AndyCanfield]

Ada Lovelace or Linda Lovelace? I volunteer for the Linda Lovelace test.

Re:Which Lovelace?

[AndyCanfield]

The Linda Lovelace test is when you make love to a lady and you can't tell if she's a human or a robot. I live in Thailand, and I have been involved in the Linda Lovelace test many times - including my ex-wive.

Re:Which Lovelace?

[PPH]

Thailand

can't tell if she's a human or a robot.

I think you've got the wrong success criteria there. It's if you can't tell she's a she or not.

AC and Turing Test

[TWX]

Sometimes I wonder if all of the ACs are simply one bot with the electronic equivalent of schizophrenia talking to itself...

philosophical discussion only not science

[globaljustin]

So if someone figures out how the brain works, and is about to describe its function, then people will no longer be intelligent? Intelligence is a characteristic of behavior. If it behaves intelligently, then it is intelligent. The underlying mechanism should be irrelevant.

No.

you describe "behaviorism" which is a thoroughly discredited and reductive theory

the ***whole conversation*** is about ***the underlying mechanism***

the "Lovelace Test" is more rigorous, but how it will affect computing I cannot say, because the Turing Test itself is a time-wasting notion.

the problem: questions of "what is intelligence" are Philosophy 101 questions...not scientific or computing questions...and we hurt our industry when we overlap the two

just because we can prod a human to make them do something, or dose them with a chemical or whathaveyou, doesn't mean we have disproven the existence of "free will"

we will map every neural connection in the human brain soon, this doesn't mean all humans will become remote controlled techno-zombies

people take other's freedom by many means:
by gunpoint
emotional manipulation
through blackmail
too much alchohol
the Frey Effect
threats of loss of work

so learning how neurons work is just another potential addition to that list

the point: humans have free will and it can be subverted in many ways, this does not have any implications in computing

Re:philosophical discussion only not science

[Anonymous Coward]

the Turing Test itself is a time-wasting notion

Really? There are people with whom I interact only through e-mail. Some are colleagues, with whom I discuss new problems at work, jointly consider the social implications of various solutions, and collaborate to overcome. Some are friends, with whom I bitch about my life, offer sincere camaraderie, and generally share emotions in both directions. If the Turing Test is passed, and I can do all of that with AIs at the other end - that is, if computers are functionally capable of substituting for many of the people in today's society - you don't think that's significant?

The Lovelace Test, meanwhile, is trivial and meaningless. "cat /dev/urandom" passes the test: it creates original output within the first few bytes.

Re:philosophical discussion only not science

[Anonymous Coward]

In C, this function exhibits limited free will:

int f(int x) {
        int a;
        if (x > 0) {
                a = 0;
        }
        return a;
}

in any environment where uninitialized variables are not a problem and stay uninitialized. Specifically, 'a' will contain whatever was in that memory location at the time, and only gets written with zero when x > 0. So, when I call f(-1), I'm saying "return me anything you want, your choice!", and the function will give me a number based on how it feels (ie based on its recent behaviour and inputs).

So, it's creative (I haven't told it how to choose), and potentially unexplainable (memory location may have been previously used by a totally different process if mem is wiped clean). Next problem please!

Re:philosophical discussion only not science

[Anonymous Coward]

One of my friends is a philosophy post-doc and he told me many times that in philosophy the gold standard for intelligence is intelligent behaviour. Of course he has some footnotes to add, notably that intelligent things can appear to be bricks if you cut off all their actuators, but to say that this particular variant of ‘behaviourism’ as you call it is discredited is disingenuous. In particular, if one could hypothetically replace someone's brain with a computer and not know the difference then the computer must necessarily be intelligent, insofar as humans are intelligent. Being a philosopher he has opinions about that too.

It also isn't true that the Lovelace test is more rigorous. To pass it you must produce something truly original but presumably non-random. I can only say good luck getting any human to pass this test. In practice this means of course that the bar must be lowered to some measure of non-rigorous relative originality. The weird use of the word ‘program’ doesn't make the fact that we're could actually be talking about a poem any more rigorous either. Then there is the strange notion that the machine's designers must not be able to explain why it works the way it does. Quite apart from the fact that a lot of software has multiple shades of this already as it is, the designers of course wouldn't be able to explain even the most trivial action their machine took. Of course you have to broaden this from ‘the designers’ to ‘anyone’ but then you get back into the problem that if someone ever figures out how the brain works, yours truly will no longer be intelligent according to our dear Lovelace test.

And as a matter of practical importance, there already exists a lot of machine generated art, some of it quite beautiful. The programmers can explain the algorithms of course, but often not how it got the final result just right. These would appear to pass the Lovelace test (you can disagree if you want but that just shows that the Lovelace test isn't rigorous), but are not intelligent to the best of our knowledge. The Turing test, as envisioned by Turing (rather than the garbage that has been in the news lately) is a much more reliable measure of intelligence. Could there be a better test? Probably. Maybe something is only intelligent if it can get a philosophy degree. Too bad that this test would disqualify almost all humans, though.

Re:philosophical discussion only not science

[Anonymous Coward]

No, he's not describing behaviourism. He's saying this:

If it behaves intelligently, then it is intelligent.

That's a reasonable statement to make, and if you're disagreeing with that statement, you need to say why. Converting it to a strawman and then making a bald claim that the strawman is "discredited" is a cheap rhetorical trick. And then you go on to talk about free will, which has no direct relationship with intelligence anyway. OK, I get it, you want to turn the conversation around to being about free will, because that's your ax, but telling someone their perfectly reasonable statements are "simply wrong" is a shitty way to do it. OP's point, which you're deliberately missing, is that whatever intelligence is, it is not an observer-relative thing which demands that the observer be unaware of the mechanism. If you want to engage in debate with him, try addressing that specific point, rather than a bunch of points he never made about a subject he's not discussing. And if you want to talk about free will and about how behaviourism is "discredited" maybe you could at least make a couple of points in favour of that argument, for those of us who might be interested anyway. Maybe then we can see how your belief relates to what is actually being said.

Anyway, what you're both missing is the practical issue with "The machine's designers must not be able to explain how their original code led to this new program." The machine's designers can lie, or be incapable of coming up with an explanation despite one existing, so this is a completely ill-defined criterion - which is what we're trying to get away from.

Re:philosophical discussion only not science

[Imrik]

Just because it acts close enough to human to pass for one doesn't mean it would be the kind of person you'd want to collaborate with or confide in.

Re:philosophical discussion only not science

[Agent0013]

So, it's creative (I haven't told it how to choose), and potentially unexplainable (memory location may have been previously used by a totally different process if mem is wiped clean).

So not only have you proposed that random output is somehow to be described as creativity, you have also said this is unexplainable and then proceeded to explain how it works. Nice!!!

Re:philosophical discussion only not science

[Agent0013]

One of my friends is a philosophy post-doc and he told me many times that in philosophy the gold standard for intelligence is intelligent behaviour.

If intelligent behaviour was all that was required, then a person remotely connected into that computer could do the intelligent behaviour and you would be able to call the computer intelligent. I think more is needed than that.

It also isn't true that the Lovelace test is more rigorous. To pass it you must produce something truly original but presumably non-random. I can only say good luck getting any human to pass this test.

I don't understand what you think original means. I have seen my young daughter draw lots of original drawings over and over. She even created a bird-deer in some of them, deer with 4 long skinny legs with bird feet on the ends of them. I certainly didn't tell her about bird-deer. She created them in her mind, drew them, and then told us what they were. I would love to see a computer come up with something like a bird-deer. I guess something like Creatures or Spore might come close with the genetic algorithms or something like that.

Re:philosophical discussion only not science

[Narcocide]

That doesn't exhibit free will, it exhibits a neurological disorder.

fixed link

[globaljustin]

Sorry about the bad link.

Well...

[readin]

A guy told me some 20 years ago that he read about an artificial life experiment in which a specially designed operating system was created to allow programs to execute code and, like computer viruses, reproduce themselves while competing for the resources to do so. He said the result was a program that copied itself very efficiently in a manner that the researchers found very hard to understand and was totally unexpected.

Sadly he couldn't explain the details and didn't know the experiment, but if what is says is true, did it pass the Lovelace test? It certainly seems like something that could have occurred given the capabilities of computers at the time.

Re:Well...

[retchdog]

it's worth being skeptical whenever someone's argument involves their not being able to comprehend the magnificence of their own creation (it's a form of argument from ignorance). i'm pretty sure that a serious assembly hacker could have completely traced out the reproduction mechanism within a few hours.

you see this with children too: "oh, my kid is so smart, he (did whatever) the other day and i'd never have been able to figure that out at his age."

Re:Well...

[flargleblarg]

it's worth being skeptical whenever someone's argument involves their not being able to comprehend the magnificence of their own creation (it's a form of argument from ignorance).

Not really. Not if they're using a genetic hillclimbing approach with neural networks, mutation, and evolution. Chances are, you'll never have any hope of understanding what evolves in that case. That's normal, and nothing to be skeptical about. And that would be a great way to win Core Wars.

MMX and Zero

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, that's one of those things about Mega Man X that really went off on a tangent. I mean, at some level it makes sense: the halting problem should mean that reploids shouldn't be able to analyze other reploids. The problem, of course, was that it was only X and Zero (technically, neither reploids) that couldn't be fully analyzed--and at least Dr. Cain wasn't able to do it either, as the whole "sympathy circuit" thing being a large part of the whole maverick problem*, although Dr. Cain wasn't even a master of cybernetics but merely an archaeologist and obviously Dr. Light and Wily analyzed their own creations so it stands to reason that humans could do it too (whether Ceil's Copy X was exact...well, by technical canon it was).

In the end, it all speaks about trying to somehow try to differentiate on a point that doesn't really matter. You could still end up with a Philosophical zombie. Yet for the purposes of AI, the issue is almost entirely about how indistinguishable the AI is from a "human"--really, a sufficiently advanced sapience not whether there's any sentience. And that's what the Turing test is fundamentally about. The reason the Turing test has so far failed us is that people keep wanting to use a crippled test so their pet AI can win a rigged game.

*At its core, being a maverick was not merely an issue of the maverick virus but that machine intelligence had become sufficiently advanced that it could choose to kill humans or otherwise place its own existence above serving man. Dr. Light either didn't sufficiently consider this and strived to make X "perfectly safe [for humans]"--which only adds up if Dr. Light had the forethought that X would be copied or might don a overlord suit (which Copy X's Seraphim form suggests was always there)--or he forever felt X would be inferior to humans and hence deserving of placing all humans above his own life.

The last part could make someone a hero if it were something of choice. But to enshrine it as a fact... And so it goes that what one considers a soul and what is free will are at odds. Or there's no such thing as a soul? :)

Theology now?

[istartedi]

This business of the developers not knowing how it works. It reminds me of the question "How can God create a being that sins. Doesn't that make Him responsible?". One way to answer that is that God withdraws his authority within the a locus that we call the "soul". What happens there isn't his action. This implies that while knowingly taking actions that lead to wrong is immoral, withdrawing your power from a particular locus and opening things up to potential wrongs is not immoral.

It has nothing to do with intelligence though. The "soul" could be as dumb as a post.

Re:Theology now?

[Anonymous Coward]

withdrawing your power from a particular locus and opening things up to potential wrongs is not immoral

No, but setting the biology and the resource availability to levels where the "potential" wrongs are in fact inevitable, is certainly immoral.

Core Wars

[Animats]

You're describing Core War. You can still get the source.

Re:Core Wars

[NoOneInParticular]

I think he describes Tom Ray's Tierra system.

It is equally flawed, at best.

[Anonymous Coward]

Look at the time constraints, if they were defined any less rationally I'd have to file the paper under poetry, bad poetry.

"About two years or less" Why no limit on the number of computations I can execute in that time? What if I get as good a result in ten years with the same number of total calculations, how is that not the same? Since when did true artists ever meet deadlines anyway? We don't see a note on the wall next to a painting to say how long Picasso took to conceive and execute a masterpiece. I can see it now, here is "La papa en un sofá" painted by Picasso during his slack-ass period.

Request For Comments: Evolutionary Assembly Lang.

[JacobA.Munoz]

Self-promoting a personal research project that might be able to one day meet this challenge. API is open-source, looking for peer-review, in design/specification phase. Any and all comments and questions are welcome. Documentation is still being edited, so please forgive the rough pages.

Project: Evolutionary Assembly Language (EAL aka poxEAL)
Site: http://www.poxix.com/eal/doc

Again, the project specifications are still in the design phase, so there is no software to download yet - just lots of specs working out the conceptual blueprint first. No point in coding something obviously flawed... and I know there are conceptual holes to be filled. There's no magic or supernatural claims involved, just statistics and probability... thousands of monkeys at typewriters banging out software, not Shakespeare.

Summary: EAL is a multi-purpose programming language and environment designed to solve problems using guided auto-generation of program modules. EAL adopts various concepts from the languages LISP, Basic, and generic assembly - but is NOT meant to be a manually-coded language for end-users. Provided with a batch of properly formatted "task scenarios", EAL uses a error-friendly syntax to attempt self-generated (semi-random or mutated) solutions to those tasks. Code modules are evaluated for their various fitness "grades" (size, cycles, errors, correctness, extraneous output, etc.) and the most useful modules stored and catalogued for later reuse and mutation. While you sleep, an EAL environment could be left running to optimize existing code on it's own. You can still write your own EAL program by hand.. but the breakthrough will be when you don't have to.

Much more info is in the docs, and please provide any feedback with the "comments/subscribe" form in the docs.. I desperately need written peer review .. research students, academic institutions, funding entities?... Hah! hahaha... oh yeah.. funding..... for research.. .. ah, I'm so funny..

Music Hobby

[Tablizer]

I've written music generators that produce "pleasant" music from scratch (by following time-tested harmonic, chord, and rhythm patterns and ratio's). The music may pass the Lovelace test, but will probably never win any awards.

The machine's designers must not be able to explain how their original code led to this new program.

So if we finally figure out how the human brain works, it will fail the Lovelace test just because we know how it works? A silly rule.

How is that even possible?

[mosb1000]

to pass the Lovelace Test a computer has to create something original, all by itself.

Are we even sure people can do this?

Re: 'simply' following rules

[mrt_2394871]

One of Feynman's memoirs includes the haha-only-serious observation that mathematical theorems are either unproven or trivial, and this is simply a re-statement of the same principle.

And actually, there's a lot of speculation about whether colonies exhibit intelligence or consciousness (eg Hofstadter's Aunt Hillary, but also Jack Cohen & Ian Stewart's Heaven - they also did the Science of the Discworld series with pterry).

not a great test

[SuperDre]

the lovelace test is not a great test if a machine has to create something original, all by itself, as a lot of real humans can't even do that, so a lot of humans wouldn't even pass the lovelace test..

Test for something that cant be proven, great idea

[Anonymous Coward]

>engineer a program it was not intented to produce

1 + 1 = 3

No human can pass that test

[aNonnyMouseCowered]

Well, no human alive today in any case. All so-called "original" works produced today are derivatives of older works (Shakespeare, folklore, etc) or quirks produced by the artist's mental state. Among deceased artists Van Gogh and Edgar Allan Poe are famous examples. Another reason why we should stop this "all rights reserved" nonsense of the traditional copyright system, where the artist is presumed to be a god that produces unique worlds out of nothing.

Re:No human can pass that test

[Chris Mattern]

Well, no human alive today in any case. All so-called "original" works produced today are derivatives of older works (Shakespeare, folklore, etc)

If you think Shakespeare was original, you are sadly deluded. Just about all of his plots can be traced back to other sources, from which he often lifted them virtually intact. What elevated Shakespeare wasn't the originality of his stories, but the way he told them.

Re:How many questions can YOU beg in one definitio

[91degrees]

What's a "program" ("anything")?

A deterministic sequence of instructions that could be converted to work on a universal Turing machine. I don;t htink this is really a valid criticism.

What does it mean to be "engineered to produce" one?

Presumably we're talking about a specific condition and expectation that is part of the specification. Although since a lot of specs are informal this does need to be clarified.

What's a "hardware fluke"?

Not sure on this one. My initial thought was that this was just a requirement that it not produce pure randomness and get a valid result statistically.

What constitutes "explanation" of how it was done?

I think this one is the main problem. It's very subjective what an explanation is. It's also somewhat dependent on the programmer.

Whoosh

[Anonymous Coward]

Genetic algorithm optimizers have been around since forever. Critticall http://www.critticall.com/ was a fairly easy to use one; in many cases you can just give it the goals and it can evolve program to return those goals in pseudo-C. Sometimes even the working of the generated program itself is impossible to explain, given the functionality evolves by random chance. The "machne's designers must not be able to explain how the original code led to this new program" condition however, at least as stated, is rather questionable and non-sensical. We can explain the principles of evolutionary algorithm optimization, but we certainly can't "explain" how a particular finished algorithm arose, unless every intermediary step was saven, much as we can't explain how the brains evolved. It even discovered some new algorithms, like http://leehaywood.org/misc/several-unique/ so the "create something original" is certainly accomplished. Now Critticall itself is pretty much toy, and I'd be last to argue it's artificial intelligence, so maybe it's time to try that definition again...

Think I solved it

[2fuf]

> The machine's designers must not be able to explain how their original code led to this new program

This happens in my office all the time

Scary...

[Anonymous Coward]

Quote: "In short, to pass the Lovelace Test a computer has to create something original, all by itself."
Scary. One success would resemble The Terminator's Skynet, where the computers decide on their own to quit following orders and get rid of the human race. So many trying to create a computer that can be original isn't a good idea.

Re:Scary...

[Lightning McQueen]

Original to that computer and it's programming, not to the world.

Can Humans pass this test?

[Squidlips]

Seems unlikely for most humans

So...

[Anonymous Coward]

...by that definition, Watson passed once it created it's BBQ sauce recipe, right?

This already exists in research as well

[Anonymous Coward]

Adam, the robot scientist, has been doing research since 2009.

Adam is capable of:

hypothesizing to explain observations
devising experiments to test these hypotheses
physically running the experiments using laboratory robotics
interpreting the results from the experiments
repeating the cycle as required

[From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robot_Scientist]

others have also mentioned emergent behaviors and evolutionary algorithms as meeting this criteria but this is the most concrete example of a robot creating something original by itself. but you couldn't sit down and have a conversation with it.

Re:How many questions can YOU beg in one definitio

[jeffb (2.718)]

What's a "program" ("anything")?

A deterministic sequence of instructions that could be converted to work on a universal Turing machine. I don;t htink this is really a valid criticism.

That's a reasonable definition, although I'm sure there are those who would quibble over non-deterministic operations and such. But "The new program—it could be an idea, a novel, a piece of music, anything—" seems to imply something very different. The paper talks a lot about writing stories, designing letterforms and so forth. Stories are not "programs" in the sense you (and perhaps I) think.

I agree

[Lightning McQueen]

I am in agreement with the Lovelace test. You create on your own everyday. I think most of the folks on here are missing the point and are thinking too big "I didn't come up with the idea of a rocket ship and build it therefore I fail this test". That's not what this test is about. If you've ever so much as used a paper clip for a purpose other than holding paper together, you pass this test. It's about being able to adapt your environment to suit an application. Every human is able to do this and does it everyday in a host of situations that they don't even recognize as such.

philosophical discussion only not science

[Anonymous Coward]

Most contemporary philosophers (both analytic and Continental) would heartily disagree with your assertion that humans have "free will." Anyone who took Philosophy 102 or a survey course on the history of modern/contemporary philosophy should know this.

Also, many philosophers are students of and/or scientists themselves or do work that has strong implications for science (I am thinking of say the work of DH Mellor for example who's work on time both takes from and adds to scientific understanding of the way time works not just the way it is described in physics). Another example is logic, which is properly housed in philosophy not mathematics, but science is reliant upon its use and developments. My point being is that trying to tease them apart is both reductive and impractical. They work best when they work together, and while the Lovelace test sounds flawed for several reasons (including its very poorly defined "intelligence" standard) it doesn't mean we should throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Re:How many questions can YOU beg in one definitio

[91degrees]

Yes you're right. I didn't read that properly.

Although I think the summary oversimplifies things a lot. Skimming the actual paper, it looks like the Lovelace test is not a test in itself but a means to critique tests for AI. It could apply to a chatbot or a story writer or anything else.

So if I ask a chatbot "How many legs does a horse have", it would fail if it just looks up the answer in a database that contains "legs", "horse" and knows to give the answer "4" (because can trivially explain that), but if it has learned from earlier conversation what a horse is and what a leg is and comes up with a correct answer, it would pass, because I have no way of knowing the exact inputs it used. Something like that anyway.

I prefer Linda Lovelace test...

[Anonymous Coward]

Swallow it whole.

what all those AI researches neglect imho

[Anonymous Coward]

especially about chatbots, it's less about "actual AI" than more about feeding them with enough data and to have a believable "life history" in order to be able to respond to a wide variety of input.

that Lovelace test sounds interesting, but it's also hard to define what's original and what's not. There are e.g. automatic music composers already. In that case, the scenario is quite inconceivable that it should be able to compose any music that the programmers would not expect, as music is still music at the end of the day.

what all those AI researches neglect imho is that consciousness is not only about intelligence, but also about experience. Only if an AI has made somewhat unique and individual experiences, then it could react in rather surprising ways by combining input with them. And it is even a quite interesting philosophical question then if there is any difference between real and artificial experience, it's all just data after all, right?

A Turing "Surprise" Test

[CAOgdin]

I have always respected both Ada Lovelace's and Alan Turing's genius, but the "Turing Test" has always seemed too simplistic for me. For my purposes in discussing the matter I use what I call the Alan Turing "Surprise" Test: Can a computer produce relevant responses with an unexpected but relevant response (aka "surprise") in them? Examples include puns, twists-of-phrase, sarcasm, and other artifacts of a quick-thinking conversationalist. (And, for the record, I don't consider Trolls as members of any of these classes; their range of responses is severely limited in context and devoid of any pretense of humanity. Some of you can prove that in the responses here.)

Eliza and its' various successors have never qualified, and so far only rudimentary steps have been made toward the elementary Turing Test. However, the goal is to determine whether a human can distinguish between another human's responses and a computer's responses. I'd put my Turing-Surprise test right in between the traditional definition of the Turing Test and the Lovelace Test.

About those "paltry contributions"...

[CAOgdin]

You exist. Were you not born from the body of a woman? Pretty amazing, if you ask me.

all tautology & frankenstein

[globaljustin]

In particular, if one could hypothetically replace someone's brain with a computer and not know the difference then the computer must necessarily be intelligent, insofar as humans are intelligent

simply untrue...

why? your scenario is incomplete

what is the **context** of this test of the computer-brain hybrid person?

how long do i get to talk to them? can i spend all 24 hours of each day with them? I have many more questions about the complexity of the 'test' for this frankenstein

the whole notion that "if people think it is X then it is X" is a tautology...tell that to your philosophy friend

logical contradiction & you agree with me?

[globaljustin]

you criticize me for saying something, then tell me that the OP was right **for saying the same thing**

OP's point, which you're deliberately missing, is that whatever intelligence is, it is not an observer-relative thing which demands that the observer be unaware of the mechanism

that was MY point...

intelligence IS NOT OBSERVER RELATIVE...that's why the Turing Test and Lovelace Test are completely unusable and foolish as a test of acheiving "artificial intelligence"

because they can **move the goalposts**

you're agreeing with me, getting upmodded...but talking as if you have presented a counterpoint

give me your bank info

[globaljustin]

if humans do not have free will, then email me your bank logins and passwords

also your home address

if you don't possess free will, let me get a few things in writing and we'll talk further

Re:give me your bank info

[Murasaki Skies]

That in fact won't and can't happen because there's no motivation for it to happen. There is no "free will" available to make that decision, and there is no actual will, either, so it is impossible. If you disagree then I suppose you think you can saw your arm off for no reason via "free will". Which in fact won't and can't happen because you had no reason to do so. If you had a sufficient reason then it not happening would be impossible instead. Whatever decisions are made, causality and acausality both exclude actual choice, as the root cause is never controlled, and even if it was there would simply be a time loop that would force itself to occur, giving no extra "freedom". "Free will" is undefined, unexplained magic, and thus of no scientific meaning.

Try again?

[BlueMonk]

Ok ok ok... so how about, to prove a system is intelligent, it must devise a test that can determine whether another system is intelligent.

science & computing not philosophy

[globaljustin]

another thing, you missed my point (which I put in bold text) completely

my point was that discussions of "what is intelligence?" ARE NOT SCIENTIFIC OR COMPUTING QUESTIONS

sure, investigating how the human brain works is science...

and trying to make a faster/better computer by applying that knowledge is science...

but arguing language and definitions of abstract concepts?

philosophy major's job

Sorry, you're wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

"If the Turing Test can be fooled by common trickery", says the link to http://developers.slashdot.org/story/14/06/08/1642252/turing-test-passed. Instead, you should be arguing that the linked news wasn't a rightful success on passing the Turing test. And anyway, I am pretty sure there was a lot of work involved which doesn't fit into the "common trickery" label.-Ignacio Agulló

Examples of human-competitive results

[Scotland]

Examples of human-competitive results using genetic programming (i.e. the algorithm we refer to as Evolution):
http://www.genetic-programming...

Re:Test for something that cant be proven, great i

[ahaweb]

"Syntax error on token "=", = expected" or "ReferenceError: Invalid left-hand side in assignment"

Personhood

[AndyCanfield]

This whole Turing Test discussion is talking about the wrong issue. Nobody cares if a computer is 'intelligent' or not. What matters is whether it's a person or not. I just watched 'Terminator 2' again, and the Terminators were people. They had feelings, confusions. They learned from their environment. They did not shut down for an hour or a month at the flip of a switch. I don't care if a computer is "intelligent" or not; what matters is whether it is a person, with the right to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness that we grant Russians and Klingons and Terminators.

How do you detect whether the Ukranian is human? Ask him if his wife is a good screw. If he answers "NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS!", he's human. The Test is the universe to a machine, but it is only a temporary context to a human. Break out of the context and the machine is lost but the human reacts like a person.

My programs are AI sentient

[Anonymous Coward]

This confirms that I have written AI sentient programs. I have programs that do creative new things that I can't explain. Usually I just call them "bugs", and I have to fix them :P

Never

[Anonymous Coward]

This will never ever happen, and I honestly do not see why people assume you can make a human mind out of electronics. In my opinion you could mimick a brain's neurology in software, or mimic thinking, but it will never ever actually be self aware like even a mouse is.

Re:must be a black box!

[GuB-42]

But, of course, the ultimate test of machine intelligence is when the computer can sue your ass off and win in the Supreme Court.

Well, I expect computers to become really good at law.
The big idea with legal systems is to refer to some written laws and precedents rather than the whim of the judge. Basically it's a search problem and it's one of the things that computers do best.

Deep Throat

[Anonymous Coward]

Am I the only one who tought of it?

Oh way... Slashdot.

Nevermind.

yes let's all have opinions on AI

[stonecypher]

This is nonsense. Computers generate programs they weren't designed to produce all the time.

There's a very beginner-approachable book on the topic called "Blondie24: Playing at the Edge of AI."

This "challenge" was passed by Claude Shannon in the 60s.

proved my point

[globaljustin]

"Free will" is undefined, unexplained magic, and thus of no scientific meaning.

***scientific***

right...that means the reverse is true....***science cannont disprove the existence of "free will" either***

which agrees with me...my ORIGINAL POST said the exact same thing...it's even in the title...

questions of "what is intelligence?" and "what is free will?" are **not answerable by science**

"free will" and "intelligence" are socially constructed words to describe observations of human behavior....they "exist" as concepts only in the context of human interaction

you can say "free will is an illusion" but that doesn't take away my ability to sue you in court if you violate my "free will" by drugging me and raping me

so I'm right...science cannot disprove the existence of "free will"

But

[Anonymous Coward]

There are humans who couldn't pass this test....

i blunder in,

[Anonymous Coward]

thinking this was named after linda

Then there's the LINDA Lovelace test,

[Anonymous Coward]

which is...oh, never mind.

Wrong question ...

[FreedomFirstThenPeac]

The first thing you have to ask is whether a computer that passes the test has some rights that other machines don't. The test we are looking for is one that, if a program passes the test then legal protections would intervene if you wanted to shut it off and scramble the memory. Any other test is just semantics and tomfoolery, like arguing over what color is the sky. Without the actionable component (a blue sky means I don't need my umbrella to get across the parking lot to my car) the question of "best test for AI ..." is a form of mental self-abuse, without the happy ending.

True Computer Creativity was solved long ago

[curtwelch]

Here's a classic example of computer creativity at work:

NASA Evolved Antenna

misleading in many ways

[Anonymous Coward]

As others have noted, no Machine has yet passed the TT except in the minds of tabloid fantasists.
I have to note that I became really sceptical about the report the minute I saw that Bringsjord, Bello & Ferrucci, the paper alleging the superiority of the Lovelace Test, dated Turing's "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" to 1964, when the great man had been dead for 10 years, rather than its first celebrated appearance in Mind in 1950.
As Edmund Burke never wrote, all that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for wanky academics to ignore history.

If people think the Turing Test

[Anonymous Coward]

as understood by the media was ever an actual test for AI, then there's no reason to believe they will come up with a better test.

Case in point, see above.