Alan Turing's Prediction for the Year 2000

Chernicky writes "In 1950, Alan Turing , the father of computer science and (arguably) artificial intelligence, made a prediction about the year 2000. Turing said that in about fifty years, the answers of a computer would be indistinguishable from those of human beings, when asked questions by a human interrogator. With the year 2000 upon us, Dartmouth College is offering a $100,000 prize to the first programmer that can pass the Turing Test. The deadline for submissions is October 30, 1999. "

Comments

I hope I can pass...

[zuvembi]

Dartmouth College is offering a $100,000 prize
to the first programmer that can pass the Turing Test.

Ummm, I sure hope I can pass the Turing test. I know some of you out there might have problems passing it, but I'm pretty confident I can pass.

Of course if he meant 'first program' it might make more sense.

The Turing Test is no longer a goal of AI

[Nagash]

The Turing Test has long been discounted as a bad goal of AI research, although people have been doing Turing Test "auditions" for years.

The problem with the Turing Test is that it tries to make a computer human and that's not really what AI is all about - it's more about trying to solve problems using various techniques in order to make programs useful. (Maybe making a computer human is not all that useful ;) )

The problem is that the program only needs to pass 5 minutes worth of conversation. That's a pretty narrow goal. Technically, it's not really artificial intelligence at this point - it's just a ruse (however, it's still extremely diffucult to program natural language capabilities and have "common sense" -- two goals that are themselves not bad ones to do research in).

Douglas R. Hofstadter wrote an interesting article about this - he had a conversation with a program named Nicolai (I think). It was quite amusing - the program spits out some very interesting answers. :-)

Anyway, no one has yet succeeded at this and if you feel you can get a program to imitate a human for 5 minutes, go right ahead. You'll earn that $100K :-)

Woz

Re:The Turing Test is no longer a goal of AI

[Jamie Zawinski]

that's not really what AI is all about - it's more about trying to solve problems using various techniques in order to make programs useful.

That's not the goal of AI, that's the goal of programming.

There was a time when expert sytems were AI. Before that, anything DWIMish was AI. Now it's all just programming.

Why? Because the only definition that consistently fits AI is clever stuff we don't really know how to program yet.

Someone (I forget who, maybe Dave Touretzsky?) said once, ``AI is like a magic trick. The first time you see it, you think wow, that's amazing! That must be magic! Then you want to know how it's done, and someone tells you, and you think, wow, that's really clever! Then later, after you understand it and it's no longer novel, when you see it again you think, well it's just slight-of-hand, duh.''

Once something doesn't feel like magic any more, because it has become common-place, it is no longer AI. At that point, it's just programming.

(And some pointy-headed loser will probably even refer to it as a ``design pattern.'')

I like that Hofstadter dialogue you mentioned, but calling something that passes the Turing test a ruse kind of misses Hofstadter's point entirely. Just because you understand why a program passes the Turing test doesn't mean it didn't pass, and it doesn't mean you are excused from treating the program as a human. Because if you hypothetically understood all the chemical and electrical processes that made us work, it wouldn't excuse you from treating your fellow humans decently. ``Oh, it's just a meat-machine pretending to be clever'' isn't an excuse.

To bastardize the Arthur C. Clarke quote, any sufficiently understood magic is indistinguishable from technology.

Turing test? Nahh...

[HoserHead]

Back in my BBS days, I was rather naive (to say the least) and wasn't very well-versed in the ways of the BBS. I went to page the Sysop of this particular BBS, and lo and behold! he was there. I proceeded then to have a lengthy (30+ minute) conversation with this sysop, after which I sent him a nice mail thanking him for humouring me (some of his answers were pretty bizzare, so I went along with them!)

It was only after I myself had begun setting up a BBS that I came across this BBS door program. I don't remember what it was called, but it pretended to be a chat program. Basically, it responded to specified keywords with a random sentence from a huge flatfile database, and even pretended to have typooo^H^Hs from time to time.

I then realised that I'd been had!

Some sysop must have been laughing his ass off at this young kid who went by the handle "Orion", chatting away with a very crude AI and being suckered into it the whole way.

I look back on those days and wonder how I missed it. But it just goes to show you that, as much as you might be fooled by a computer, we've got a long way to go before we reach anything approximating independent thought. Personally I don't think it'll ever happen - but it might be neat to be proven wrong.

what's the point?

[Scaramouche]

please do not mistake my intent- i would be quite
impressed with anyone who could pass the turing
test.

however, how much further does this really get us
than building a computer which can beat kasparov
in a (relatively) high speed chess match. chess
seemed like a big thing to teach a computer once,
but it has been relegated to the relatively
trivial now.

it seems to me that a program which passes the
turing test may well fall into the same category.
(i am assuming here that the program merely
appears to be having a conversation- that it is
not a language _understanding_ system.) it would
simply become something that people would set
loose in chatrooms, or attach to old unwanted
e-mail accounts, and watch the fun.

what i'd like to see is someone tackling a truely
significant problem. like programming a computer
to be able to vaccume your house.

The Turing Test -- real experience.

[SEE]

I was on a MUD. Somebody struck up a conversation with me, and then suddenly stopped. He turned to a companion and said, "OC: I feel really dumb -- I actually thought that 'bot was another player."

I must say that I was rather embarassed at being thought a 'bot, and immediately denied it -- at which point the other player said, "OC: Well, it is really believeable -- see how it even denied it was a 'bot? Whoever wrote it was good."

Loebner Prize

[xyz]

Those contests have been going on for a while.

From what I read, most people working in AI don't treat them as something worth while. It's fairly obvious that programs won't be able to pass the turing test for some time (decades, maybe centuries), and the results of such tests only make it less likely that people working on valid AI projects will be taken seriously.

The Loebner Prize has it's own homepage. Chech out the transcripts of the conversations. The most 'clever' programs simply look for keywords, some insist on asking all the questions, some are 'whimsical' and use metaphores while constatnly switching topics, none show any comprehension whatsoever.

You're not fooling anyone you know

[Greyfox]

We all know you're a bot, so you may as well stop trying to fool everyone.