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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.

188 of 285 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Lovelace? by I'm+just+joshin · · Score: 5, Funny

    Maybe they mean the "Linda Lovelace" test?

  2. dwarf fortress by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    That is all.

    1. Re:dwarf fortress by Horshu · · Score: 1

      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.

    2. Re:dwarf fortress by Draugo · · Score: 2

      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.

    3. Re:dwarf fortress by bughunter · · Score: 1

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

      --
      I can see the fnords!
  3. Most humans couldn't pass that test by voss · · Score: 4, Insightful

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

    1. Re:Most humans couldn't pass that test by retchdog · · Score: 1

      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.

      --
      "They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
    2. Re:Most humans couldn't pass that test by Lisias · · Score: 1

      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.

      --
      Lisias@Earth.SolarSystem.OrionArm.MilkyWay.Local.Virgo.Universe.org
    3. Re:Most humans couldn't pass that test by mi · · Score: 1

      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.

      --
      In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
    4. Re:Most humans couldn't pass that test by sg_oneill · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

      --
      Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
    5. Re:Most humans couldn't pass that test by jimmydevice · · Score: 1

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

    6. Re:Most humans couldn't pass that test by TWX · · Score: 2

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

      --
      Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
    7. Re:Most humans couldn't pass that test by TapeCutter · · Score: 1

      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.

      --
      And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
    8. Re:Most humans couldn't pass that test by lorinc · · Score: 1

      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.

    9. Re:Most humans couldn't pass that test by HornWumpus · · Score: 1

      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.

      --
      John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
    10. Re:Most humans couldn't pass that test by HornWumpus · · Score: 1

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

      Philosopher #2: Minds must be too highly trained.

      --
      John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
    11. Re:Most humans couldn't pass that test by serviscope_minor · · Score: 1

      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.

      --
      SJW n. One who posts facts.
    12. Re:Most humans couldn't pass that test by jrumney · · Score: 1

      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.

    13. Re:Most humans couldn't pass that test by gurps_npc · · Score: 1
      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?

      --
      excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
    14. Re:Most humans couldn't pass that test by sociocapitalist · · Score: 1

      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.

      --
      blindly antisocialist = antisocial
    15. Re:Most humans couldn't pass that test by StikyPad · · Score: 1

      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.

    16. Re:Most humans couldn't pass that test by CAOgdin · · Score: 1

      Define "original" with some precision, please.

    17. Re:Most humans couldn't pass that test by retchdog · · Score: 1

      Yes.

      --
      "They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
    18. Re:Most humans couldn't pass that test by jfengel · · Score: 1

      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.

    19. Re:Most humans couldn't pass that test by Lisias · · Score: 1

      whoops....

      I.Q. :-)

      --
      Lisias@Earth.SolarSystem.OrionArm.MilkyWay.Local.Virgo.Universe.org
    20. Re:Most humans couldn't pass that test by sg_oneill · · Score: 1

      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.,

      --
      Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
  4. The machine's designers? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    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"?

    1. Re:The machine's designers? by wish · · Score: 1

      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.

       

  5. Lovelace Test by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

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

    1. Re:Lovelace Test by sjames · · Score: 1

      How do regurgitated one-lines make you feel?

  6. Re:Lovelace? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

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

  7. Absurd by mark-t · · Score: 2

    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.

    1. Re:Absurd by Roger+W+Moore · · Score: 5, Funny

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

    2. Re:Absurd by khallow · · Score: 1

      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.

    3. Re:Absurd by Livius · · Score: 1

      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?

    4. Re:Absurd by Twinbee · · Score: 1

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

      --
      Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
  8. The Turing Test has NOT been PASSED! by IQGQNAU · · Score: 1

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

  9. Re:Turing test not passed. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

  10. Evolutionary algorithms by The+Evil+Atheist · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

    --
    Those who do not learn from commit history are doomed to regress it.
  11. Goal Post: Mysticism by Altanar · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Goal Post: Mysticism by ornil · · Score: 3

      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?

    2. Re:Goal Post: Mysticism by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 1

      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...

      --
      Ezekiel 23:20
    3. Re:Goal Post: Mysticism by The+Evil+Atheist · · Score: 2

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

      --
      Those who do not learn from commit history are doomed to regress it.
    4. Re:Goal Post: Mysticism by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

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

    5. Re:Goal Post: Mysticism by dbIII · · Score: 1

      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.

    6. Re:Goal Post: Mysticism by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      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 ...

  12. Re:Turing test not passed. by nmb3000 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    --
    "What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
    /)
  13. Most of the programs I write... by RobertJ1729 · · Score: 2

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

  14. If it's as easy as that "Turing Test" was... by Quinn_Inuit · · Score: 1

    ...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.

    --

    Stop learning! Only you can prevent esoterrorism.
  15. Already happened? by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 2

    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.

    --
    Ezekiel 23:20
    1. Re:Already happened? by geekoid · · Score: 2

      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.

      --
      The Kruger Dunning explains most post on /. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
    2. Re:Already happened? by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 1

      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?)

      --
      Ezekiel 23:20
    3. Re:Already happened? by Culture20 · · Score: 1

      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.

    4. Re:Already happened? by The+Evil+Atheist · · Score: 2

      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.

      --
      Those who do not learn from commit history are doomed to regress it.
    5. Re:Already happened? by Culture20 · · Score: 1

      Without science, philosophy is useless.

      Philosophy created science without science's help.

    6. Re:Already happened? by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 1

      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".

      --
      Ezekiel 23:20
    7. Re:Already happened? by The+Evil+Atheist · · Score: 2

      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.

      --
      Those who do not learn from commit history are doomed to regress it.
    8. Re:Already happened? by The+Evil+Atheist · · Score: 1

      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.

      --
      Those who do not learn from commit history are doomed to regress it.
    9. Re:Already happened? by Culture20 · · Score: 1

      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.

    10. Re:Already happened? by The+Evil+Atheist · · Score: 1

      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.

      --
      Those who do not learn from commit history are doomed to regress it.
    11. Re:Already happened? by Your.Master · · Score: 1

      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).

    12. Re:Already happened? by The+Evil+Atheist · · Score: 2

      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.

      --
      Those who do not learn from commit history are doomed to regress it.
    13. Re:Already happened? by oodaloop · · Score: 1

      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.

      --
      Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
    14. Re:Already happened? by StikyPad · · Score: 1

      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.

    15. Re:Already happened? by The+Evil+Atheist · · Score: 1

      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.

      --
      Those who do not learn from commit history are doomed to regress it.
    16. Re:Already happened? by gordo3000 · · Score: 1

      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.

    17. Re:Already happened? by AthanasiusKircher · · Score: 1

      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

    18. Re:Already happened? by The+Evil+Atheist · · Score: 1

      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.

      --
      Those who do not learn from commit history are doomed to regress it.
    19. Re:Already happened? by nikkipolya · · Score: 1

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

  16. Already been done by geekoid · · Score: 1

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

    It was better and unique.

    --
    The Kruger Dunning explains most post on /. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
    1. Re:Already been done by Tablizer · · Score: 1

      Your Freudian slip suggests you need a vacation.

  17. Re:Lovelace? by Noah+Haders · · Score: 1

    that's what I assumed it to be.

  18. Computer Chess by JimSadler · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re: Computer Chess by eric31415927 · · Score: 1

      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])

    2. Re:Computer Chess by phantomfive · · Score: 1

      You can see a random number generator with unpredictable events.

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    3. Re:Computer Chess by 91degrees · · Score: 1

      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.

    4. Re:Computer Chess by Zontar_Thing_From_Ve · · Score: 1

      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.

    5. Re:Computer Chess by Wescotte · · Score: 1

      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.

  19. How many questions can YOU beg in one definition? by jeffb+(2.718) · · Score: 1

    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.

  20. Hell, Eliza had me going for a bit. by Trax3001BBS · · Score: 1

    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...

  21. Re:Turing test not passed. by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  22. Re:Lovelace? by seven+of+five · · Score: 2

    Just give me the blow by blow account.

  23. Re:Turing test not passed. by sjames · · Score: 4, Informative

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

    So it passed the Turingish test.

  24. Why I like programming by mrprogrammerman · · Score: 1

    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.

    1. Re:Why I like programming by David_Hart · · Score: 1

      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.

  25. seriously bad test by bloodhawk · · Score: 1

    "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.

  26. Re:Turing test not passed. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    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.

  27. The meta-turing test by swm · · Score: 1

    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.

  28. Asimov already covered this... by dlingman · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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?

    1. Re:Asimov already covered this... by Chris+Mattern · · Score: 1

      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.

    2. Re:Asimov already covered this... by Chelloveck · · Score: 1

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

      --
      Chelloveck
      I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
    3. Re:Asimov already covered this... by Chris+Mattern · · Score: 1

      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!

  29. No one is passing the Turing Test by quantaman · · Score: 2

    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.

    --
    I stole this Sig
  30. Computer Chess by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    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.

  31. Chess no let's play global thermonuclear war by Joe_Dragon · · Score: 1

    what side do you want?

  32. Hypothesis generator plus motivation calculator by mburns · · Score: 1

    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.

    --
    Michael J. Burns
  33. Re:Lovelace? by Horshu · · Score: 2

    That's deep, man.

  34. must be a black box! by AndyCanfield · · Score: 1

    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.

  35. Which Lovelace? by AndyCanfield · · Score: 1

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

    1. Re:Which Lovelace? by AndyCanfield · · Score: 1

      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.

    2. Re:Which Lovelace? by PPH · · Score: 1

      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.

      --
      Have gnu, will travel.
  36. Re:Turing test not passed. by phantomfive · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    --
    "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
  37. Re:Lovelace? by TWX · · Score: 4, Funny

    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..."

    --
    Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
  38. Re:Lovelace? by TWX · · Score: 1

    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...

    --
    Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
  39. AC and Turing Test by TWX · · Score: 1

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

    --
    Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
  40. philosophical discussion only not science by globaljustin · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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

    --
    Thank you Dave Raggett
    1. Re:philosophical discussion only not science by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      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.

    2. Re:philosophical discussion only not science by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

    3. Re:philosophical discussion only not science by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    4. Re:philosophical discussion only not science by Imrik · · Score: 1

      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.

    5. Re:philosophical discussion only not science by Agent0013 · · Score: 1

      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!!!

      --

      -- ssoorrrryy,, dduupplleexx sswwiittcchh oonn.. -Quote found on actual fortune cookie.
    6. Re:philosophical discussion only not science by Agent0013 · · Score: 1

      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.

      --

      -- ssoorrrryy,, dduupplleexx sswwiittcchh oonn.. -Quote found on actual fortune cookie.
    7. Re:philosophical discussion only not science by Narcocide · · Score: 1

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

  41. Re:Turing test not passed. by AthanasiusKircher · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  42. Well... by readin · · Score: 1

    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.

    --
    I often don't like the choices people make, but I like the fact that people make choices. That's why I'm a conservative.
    1. Re:Well... by retchdog · · Score: 1

      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."

      --
      "They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
    2. Re:Well... by flargleblarg · · Score: 1

      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.

  43. Re:Turing test not passed. by TapeCutter · · Score: 2

    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.

    --
    And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
  44. Re:Lovelace? by DaveAtFraud · · Score: 1

    ...

    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

    --
    They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.
    Ben
  45. Re:Turing test not passed. by TapeCutter · · Score: 1

    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.

    --
    And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
  46. Theology now? by istartedi · · Score: 1

    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.

    --
    For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
  47. Core Wars by Animats · · Score: 2

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

    1. Re:Core Wars by NoOneInParticular · · Score: 1

      I think he describes Tom Ray's Tierra system.

  48. Re:Lovelace? by goombah99 · · Score: 2

    "the server sucked my job right in"

    --
    Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
  49. Re:Turing test not passed. by TapeCutter · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

    --
    And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
  50. Re:Turing test not passed. by gordo3000 · · Score: 1

    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.

  51. Music Hobby by Tablizer · · Score: 1

    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.

  52. How is that even possible? by mosb1000 · · Score: 1

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

    Are we even sure people can do this?

  53. Re:Turing test not passed. by phantomfive · · Score: 1

    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.

    --
    "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
  54. Re:Turing test not passed. by phantomfive · · Score: 2

    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.

    --
    "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
  55. Re:Turing test not passed. by phantomfive · · Score: 1

    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.

    --
    "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
  56. Re:Turing test not passed. by HornWumpus · · Score: 1

    But could an infinite number of ACs?

    --
    John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
  57. Re:Turing test not passed. by ZeRu · · Score: 1

    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.

    --
    If you post as an AC, don't expect me to spend a mod point on you.
  58. Re: 'simply' following rules by mrt_2394871 · · Score: 2

    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).

  59. not a great test by SuperDre · · Score: 1

    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..

  60. Re:Turing test not passed. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    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

  61. Re:Turing test not passed. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  62. No human can pass that test by aNonnyMouseCowered · · Score: 1

    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.

    1. Re:No human can pass that test by Chris+Mattern · · Score: 1

      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.

  63. Re:Turing test not passed. by AthanasiusKircher · · Score: 1

    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.

  64. Re:How many questions can YOU beg in one definitio by 91degrees · · Score: 1

    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.

  65. Re:Turing test not passed. by AthanasiusKircher · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  66. Re:Turing test not passed. by blue+trane · · Score: 1

    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.

  67. Re:Turing test not passed. by konaya · · Score: 1

    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.

  68. Re:Lovelace? by Talderas · · Score: 2

    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.

    --
    "Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
  69. Think I solved it by 2fuf · · Score: 1

    > 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

  70. Can Humans pass this test? by Squidlips · · Score: 1

    Seems unlikely for most humans

  71. Re:Lovelace? by MrNaz · · Score: 1

    All these puns suck.

    --
    I hate printers.
  72. Re:Turing test not passed. by bondsbw · · Score: 1

    "What is intelligence?"

    If it behaves intelligently, then it is intelligent.

    "What is intelligent behavior?"

    --
    All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
  73. Re:How many questions can YOU beg in one definitio by jeffb+(2.718) · · Score: 1

    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.

  74. I agree by Lightning+McQueen · · Score: 1

    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.

  75. Re:Scary... by Lightning+McQueen · · Score: 1

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

  76. Re:Turing test not passed. by BryanL · · Score: 2

    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.

  77. Re:Lovelace? by geekoid · · Score: 1

    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.

    --
    The Kruger Dunning explains most post on /. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
  78. Re:Turing test not passed. by geekoid · · Score: 1

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

    --
    The Kruger Dunning explains most post on /. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
  79. Re:How many questions can YOU beg in one definitio by 91degrees · · Score: 1

    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.

  80. Re:Turing test not passed. by geekoid · · Score: 1

    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.

    --
    The Kruger Dunning explains most post on /. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
  81. Re:Turing test not passed. by geekoid · · Score: 1

    Turing would consider many of today's systems AI.

    --
    The Kruger Dunning explains most post on /. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
  82. Re:Turing test not passed. by nine-times · · Score: 1

    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.

  83. A Turing "Surprise" Test by CAOgdin · · Score: 2

    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.

  84. About those "paltry contributions"... by CAOgdin · · Score: 1

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

  85. Re:Lovelace? by Chelloveck · · Score: 1

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

    --
    Chelloveck
    I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
  86. Re:Turing test not passed. by Agent0013 · · Score: 1

    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.

    --

    -- ssoorrrryy,, dduupplleexx sswwiittcchh oonn.. -Quote found on actual fortune cookie.
  87. Re:Turing test not passed. by gstoddart · · Score: 1

    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.

    --
    Lost at C:>. Found at C.
  88. all tautology & frankenstein by globaljustin · · Score: 1

    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

    --
    Thank you Dave Raggett
  89. logical contradiction & you agree with me? by globaljustin · · Score: 1

    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

    --
    Thank you Dave Raggett
  90. give me your bank info by globaljustin · · Score: 1

    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

    --
    Thank you Dave Raggett
  91. Try again? by BlueMonk · · Score: 1

    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.

  92. Re:Turing test not passed. by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 1

    "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.

  93. science & computing not philosophy by globaljustin · · Score: 1

    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

    --
    Thank you Dave Raggett
  94. Re:Lovelace? by bughunter · · Score: 2

    Nice servers don't go down.

    --
    I can see the fnords!
  95. Re:Turing test not passed. by TangoMargarine · · Score: 1

    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).

    --
    Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
  96. Re:Turing test not passed. by TangoMargarine · · Score: 1

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

    Blargh.

    --
    Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
  97. Examples of human-competitive results by Scotland · · Score: 1

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

  98. Re:Test for something that cant be proven, great i by ahaweb · · Score: 1

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

  99. Re:Lovelace? by amicusNYCL · · Score: 2

    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.

    --
    "Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
  100. Re:Turing test not passed. by fabrica64 · · Score: 1

    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.

  101. Personhood by AndyCanfield · · Score: 1

    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.

  102. Re:Lovelace? by TWX · · Score: 1

    Windows, you whore!

    --
    Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
  103. Re:must be a black box! by GuB-42 · · Score: 1

    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.

  104. yes let's all have opinions on AI by stonecypher · · Score: 1

    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.

    --
    StoneCypher is Full of BS
  105. proved my point by globaljustin · · Score: 1

    "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"

    --
    Thank you Dave Raggett
  106. Wrong question ... by FreedomFirstThenPeac · · Score: 1

    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.

    --
    "There is no god but allah" - well, they got it half right.
  107. Re:Turing test not passed. by 14erCleaner · · Score: 1

    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.

    --
    Have you read my blog lately?
  108. True Computer Creativity was solved long ago by curtwelch · · Score: 1

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

    NASA Evolved Antenna

  109. Re:Lovelace? by MutualFun · · Score: 1

    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."

  110. Re:Turing test not passed. by blue+trane · · Score: 1

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