Well of course it's the same "defense" - that's the only basis for taking this kind of action, isn't it? That is, regardless of the legitimacy of this particular claim, it would still necessarily fall within your criteria, which consists of "they say they're doing what the law says they should". I don't know the specifics of those other cases (the only real trademark abuse I'm familiar with offhand is the guy who threatened everyone under the sun using the word "stealth" in part or incidentally). However, I'm not saying that when held under scrutiny T-mobile's claim is valid, it just *appears* sufficiently potentially valid to warrant discussion. It is not "idiotic".
No, it simply is not. 1) Colors can easily constitute a major portion of a trademark (IANAL). 2) Companies are obligated to protect their trademarks as closely as is reasonable, lest they lose it to the public domain (if that term is proper for non-copyright-related IP). Given that the two entities share a similar field, and that it is the same word ("mobile") that is colorized, it would be irresponsible of T-mobile to not consider this as a potential threat to their trademark. I'm not saying they would win if it came down to a court case, or even that it would be worth taking any kind of more severe legal action than what they already did, but I see no reason to assume that the request is invalid.
Indeed. I expected a nastygram, but the letter was very straight-forward and, aside from presupposing that engadget would no doubt agree to the change, fair. Probably the nicest legal letter from a company I've ever seen posted online. The reaction was overblown and unnecessary.
Actually, the AC seems to have a far better grasp on reality than you do. His post is consistent with what I have already heard on this topic from sources that I consider to be reasonably reliable, and mirrors what other slashdotters have stated. You on the other hand made a bogus argument a few comments up that demonstrates either a fundamental misunderstanding about color and the construction of monitors, or an unwillingness to declare or justify your subjective basis before launching into a rant. See http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=507416&cid=22933648 to http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=507416&cid=22934156.
I strongly suspect that, as the guy above me said, the joke is that they're totally ignoring today. But still, we had a fake story yesterday that irresponsibly came across as serious in the summary (DX11, ray tracing).
I don't often respond to this kind of post, but...
Translation - was raised on windows, doesn't have a clue what goes on in the "real" world.
The kid is fucking eleven. I'm sorry his grasp on reality isn't what you expect it to be.
This kid's gonna develop some terrible habits and on top of that, will think landing his next job will be just as easy.
As for the first part: People (I think ESR) say learning to program in Visual Basic destroys minds. I always felt that VB simply has a way of tricking people who aren't programmers into thinking that they are, but this says nothing about the rest, except that they make up a smaller percentage. Same principle applies here. As for the second part: Sure, whatever you say (*eyeroll*).
He's going to have truck loads of disappointment dumped on him in about 10 years.
Well sure, if this is all he accomplishes by the time he's 21. I'd assume that he's going to go to, you know, college, and if he searches for a part time job at any age before graduation, I doubt it'd be a negative that he has any form of administrative experience.
To summarize and reiterate: The kid's fucking eleven. Any activity taken on his part now is above and beyond casual expectations. Using a Microsoft product when you're young does not doom you to mediocrity. Get over yourself.
Really, though this comes story boils down to the fact that it is just not that impressive that someone 11 years old can do the job of network administrator. For most of human history, this person would have been on the cusp of adulthood. 11 only sounds young because we artificially retard our population so that most never learn to function until much later.
I can't fully explain it, but I really like something about that insight. Maybe it's that I wonder what I could've accomplished if I knew everything I know now back when I was 11.
Somehow I don't think money was the first thing on Szilard's mind when he wrote that letter to FDR initiating the Manhattan project. And somehow I don't think military and intelligence agencies give a damn about intellectual property when war or national security are on their minds.
It doesn't stop the problem that people will use as much bandwidth for p2p apps as they can get away with. This is not a technological problem and there will never be a technological solution.
Of course it is. Taking up too many resources on a multiuser system is a technological problem, one that is solved with disk quotas and per-user cpu utilization limits. Taking up too many resources on a network is likewise a technological problem, one that should be addressed with intelligent bandwidth accounting that allows for bursts and does not mislead users as to their permitted allotment.
We shouldn't have to rely on client-side mercy, whether it's in the form of near-universal TCP congestion control or in the form of politely begging your users to not seed bittorrent 24/7. The subscriber and provider should have perfect knowledge of how much bandwidth they're using and are allowed, independent of protocol. Tack on QoS afterwards, but give the user control of their preferences and make them responsible for not screwing themselves out of usable VoIP.
That is, begin with a bandwidth rate, usage of which is guaranteed. Then tack on a burstable higher rate which is quota'd. Then give the user the ability to tag which traffic is most important to them, again putting known and reasonable quotas on this amount. Make all these requirements public instead of being intentionally vague about what users can and can not use your network for and getting mad about it afterwards.
Amen to that. Satellite radio has fairly good diversity, and spending half an hour listening to it is the best way to see how force-fed terrestrial radio is. This is also coming from a NYC-area resident.
The "I could do that in five minutes" argument works for a subset of what's called "art", and it's a shame that this detracts from the perceived merit of the rest of what's out there. I remember being infuriated when I went to the Museum of Modern Art and saw a blank piece of canvas with a slash through it being lauded in the same building that housed a Jackson Pollock piece.
Anyway, back to the point. I like the arrogance. It's nice to get away from other majors and disciplines for a moment and revel in the uniformity with which you and your classmates perceive the world. I just wouldn't recommend taking oneself too seriously at such moments. For instance, I know a professor in my school's Science Technology & Society department who *is* a walking stereotype of how others perceive his field, and I ridicule him for that (not to his face obviously). At the same time, I can see areas of my conversations with my peers that could be subject to ridicule as well (at least, if the observer could understand the implications of the technical vocabulary).
That's interesting, I didn't consider the possibility of going hybrid, leaving all non-essential stuff on hard disk and putting the system partitions in flash. Maybe I should give that a shot next time I upgrade. What do you think is the performance difference between using an expensive SSD and a normal CF card and IDE adapter?
Read the GP for context: jgarra23 was responding to CoE's post that (jokingly) implied a method of making money off gratuitous lawsuits, not to the events of the article. Parent is no troll.
Well be careful with that - if we compare "parts" to the features of a model of computation, then combining two machines with equivalent power together can yield something more powerful. For instance, I believe a push down automaton with two stacks instead of one turns out to be Turing complete. On the other hand, once you've reached Turing completeness, no (reasonable) combination of other non super-Turing parts lets you increase your computational power (that is, Turing machines are closed under composition or similar combinations).
The point is that intelligence can very well be an emergent property.
I didn't read the article until I saw the dupe and didn't realize that the professor behind this project is indeed Selmer Bringsjord, the one I leave nameless above. He's a smart man, but honestly, I disagree with most of the things he has to say. His proofs are vague and presumptuous, and his beliefs include P = NP, that classical machines cannot match human intelligence (apologies to him if I'm misstating that one), that humans can solve the halting problem, and indeed, that humans are not the product of evolution.
The one I mentioned in my previous post proceeded as follows:
1. Turing machines cannot solve the halting problem. (Established, mathematically proven) 2. Humans can solve the halting problem. (Like hell they can, but let's grant it for this argument) 3. Humans are super-Turing. (By 1 and 2) 4. No product of an algorithmic process can produce a super-Turing result. (Well...) 5. Evolution is an algorithmic process. (Sure there's some non-determinism but so what?) 6. By 3, 4, and 5, humans are not a product of evolution!
The major flaw in this, besides 2, is 4. An algorithmic process can produce a super-Turing result if it is fed super-Turing components. For instance, we can algorithmically combine an oracle machine with a regular Turing machine to produce another oracle machine. If there's some magical oracular "halting chemical element" in the universe that humans have in their brains, then there's no reason evolution or some other algorithm couldn't produce a human containing this.
However, I prefer not to consider the issue in the context of personal beliefs - there is plenty of empirical evidence from which we can attempt to deduce at least some of the key elements of intelligence. Perhaps where you and I diverge is that to me, non-deterministic behaviour is an essential part of what distinguishes "intelligence" of the kind exhibited by humans from the already established ability of machines to respond "logically" to particular input.
I do strongly disagree with the notion that whether a machine is deterministic or nondeterministic matters in this context. We know that, mathematically, both forms of Turing machines have equal power (if one ignores computation time); everything else seems to be a matter of implementation. To favor one over the other feels almost as arbitrary as choosing between organic life and silicon - why does it matter what the mechanism of thought is if the result is the same?
But this is crucial: I don't agree with your implication that humans are necessarily nondeterministic and machines deterministic. For instance, I don't exclude the possibility that the universe itself is completely deterministic, every state in the future completely derived from any state in the past. But this doesn't detract from the worth of humans or any other intelligent being. If on the other hand we assume the opposite, I don't see why quantum computers should be considered more powerful than classical ones when it comes to AI, unless they end up defying the Church-Turing Thesis.
In other words: free will. Do you believe in it? This will naturally affect your view of the relevance of the Turing test.
I do believe in "free will", but I don't think I would define the phrase in the way most would. In particular, I believe in both free will and determinism, or at least assert that there's no conflict between them. Apparent paradox: "How can you have free will if you could not possibly do otherwise?"; Answer: "You still have free will, you're just destined to will it in one particular way."
So I suppose my original suggestion could be put as follows: the Turing test cannot reliably distinguish between a highly complex but ultimately deterministic AI and a genuinely non-deterministic AI.
Because of their computational equivalence, I'd agree.
That is what I am driving at by saying that to simulate something, even to a very, very high degree of accuracy, will not necessarily result in equivalence.
I don't know that anything less than a perfect simulation is sufficient.
I am too lazy now to properly express them properly, but there are other key aspects of human intelligence which I believe cannot be properly tested by the Turing test. For example, human intelligence involves taking pleasure and feeling pain in an entirely subjective way which need never be communicated, expressed, or used to govern behaviour. When I listen to a particularly moving piece of music there is far more than an appreciation of skill or an analysis of content taking place: there is an extremely hard to define process in which the self is expressed and examined through a reaction to an entirely objective piece of information.
The sensation/qualia argument is the bane of Functionalism. I suppose this really is where it comes down to personal faith. Perhaps it helps that I'm not even convinced of my own "humanity" in this sense.
Similarly, humans have the capacity to choose between multiple, equally (logically) valid or invalid sets of beliefs based on entirely non-practical values and other factors. A machine could pass the Turing test but be unable to (genuinely) decide for itself whether Catholocism or Anglicanism was 'better'. And on and on - innumerable examples of behaviour, decision making and experience which are not able to be expressed in a purely deterministic way.
Humans do tend to overvalue themselves. Descartes, in the same piece, managed to both "prove" his own existence and "prove" that animals were soulless automatons.
You're reaching levels of fallacy reserved for religious fanatics and René Descartes*. The phrase "on her/their own" is extremely misleading, as it presumes a lot about the identity of the systems in question. (If you still wish to argue this point then I strongly recommend clarifying what you mean by this phrase.) You have no business equating life support to power and cooling without allowing the same analogy between the instincts built into the nervous system and the initial boot code executed by a CPU.
* "Meditations on First Philosophy" sucks and I want the whole world to know it!
I've never heard of that test before but I can tell you it's completely bogus, as it makes no sense to propose a non-trivial machine with "no programming whatsoever". Such a machine not only couldn't learn, but it couldn't do simple tasks by rote, save by some sort of quantum physics instantaneous miracle. No, not even humans satisfy this definition, since all humans (and all things commonly considered to be alive, including virii) have programming.
> "I have always regarded this leap of logic as the biggest problem with the Turing test."
But that's the point - it's not a leap of logic, it's a sufficient (and necessary?) condition for a proposed equivalence between humans and machines that Alan Turing used. Either you agree with Turing or you don't, but it's not a fallacy unless someone tries to sneak it in as a premise.
> "Just because you can't tell the difference between two things in particular circumstances doesn't mean they are the same, or functionally the same in all circumstances."
Absolutely. Let's assume for the sake of discussion we had some way to guarantee that they are functionally the same.
> "An AI could simulate a human perfectly, down to the smallest detail, and still have no actual intelligence whatsoever."
Well, that obviously depends on your personal beliefs regarding intelligence. Since I'm a Turing Functionalist, I disagree on this point - an identical machine necessarily has an identical intelligence.
> "For example, the use of 3D animation to simulate (say) an image of an aeroplane in a film doesn't mean that a 3D animated plane is the same as a real plane. But to an audience in a cinema there is no difference. To me, this is how the Turing test appears to work (or should I say, not work)"
If the animation was in fact a simulated world where all the other actors functioned as they should, then I'd argue that it is indeed a plane in that world. It's not the Test itself you're arguing with so much as the Functionalism part.
> "Another fundamental problem with Turing is this: why does a computer have to display human intelligence? An intelligent alien lifeform would fail the Turing test too. Expecting a deliberately designed bundle of wires and microchips to exhibit the same variety of intelligence as a highly evolved monkey which is adapted to hunting mammoth, reproducing to make more monkeys and killing other highly evolved monkeys is totally unrealistic."
Sure, sure. It's just that we consider humans to be intelligent (sometimes I wonder why, etc. etc., but in this context we just do), so if we can show equivalence between a machine and a human, that's sufficient to show the machine to be intelligent. Failure of this test does not necessarily mean the machine is not intelligent via equivalence with some alien creature. (I guess that answers my parenthetical question at the top about whether the Test was a necessary condition.)
> "As others have pointed out, we need a better definition of intelligence. "Able to mimic a human" just doesn't cut it."
After the above, will you understand when I say that I think it does?;)
The Turing Test is BS anyway. Taking it literally is like taking the Bible literally. Alan Turing proposed it just to demonstrate his point that a machine that could act exactly like a human, to the point that no one could tell the difference, should be considered a human. This is the foundation of the philosophical school of thought known as Turing Functionalism. The exact mechanisms of communication - IM communication, with a judge, etc. etc. - are missing the point, at least when overstated in the way the article summary does.
Honestly, our short message communications (online) have degenerated in form to the point that we shouldn't be surprised when a machine is able to present a reasonably incoherent fact simile, as many already do.
I have no idea why the parent is still marked troll three full hours after the post; the mods must be slow today. The parent is correct in that we can't define consciousness in a universally accepted way, and any proposed definition would seem to be somewhat arbitrary and non-scientific. In fact, this leads to some contentious arguments that mirror religious ones in form - people tend to argue based on presumptions the other party doesn't share, and fail to identify this disconnect until after their opponent rejects the simplest claim. For instance, I believe that machines can in principle be just as intelligent as humans, because humans are constructible from elementary parts, and so are machines. One of the professors here (at RPI - I go to the school mentioned in the article summary) by contrast believes that humans can solve* the halting problem, and thus are not constructed from elementary parts. (He gives a similar argument to "prove" that humans are not the product of evolution, but it requires an even shakier premise than the notion that humans can "solve" the halting problem.)
* This notion of solving the problem can't even be well formulated for humans. Turing machines are a precise mathematical model, and humans are of course not.
For a lesson on the basics of US government, watch Schoolhouse Rock or listen to a 4th grade social studies teacher. Then promptly disregard all that information as it is mechanical, elementary, and trivially irrelevant. For a lesson on the basics of US politics, check out the 1996 Simpsons Tree House of Horror episode (origin of the "Don't blame me! I voted for Kodos" line).
The rule of thumb is that the executive branch is significantly more powerful, and more transparently irresponsible, than you would think allowable. Historically, many presidents have been known to simply ignore the law when convenient. More recently, we have presidents who excuse others for illegal actions: Clinton pardoned his friends, Bush pardoned Libby, and for crying out loud, Ford pardoned Nixon. And while vetoes can be overridden by Congress if it has a high enough majority, pocket vetoes cannot be overturned (although they can only be used at specific times).
Of course, Congress is guilty of overstepping its bounds at times as well. The bottom line is that "Checks and Balances" are just words. The only thing preventing the entire system from falling apart is everyone's mutual binding distrust of one another.
Slashdot Mirror
Well of course it's the same "defense" - that's the only basis for taking this kind of action, isn't it? That is, regardless of the legitimacy of this particular claim, it would still necessarily fall within your criteria, which consists of "they say they're doing what the law says they should". I don't know the specifics of those other cases (the only real trademark abuse I'm familiar with offhand is the guy who threatened everyone under the sun using the word "stealth" in part or incidentally). However, I'm not saying that when held under scrutiny T-mobile's claim is valid, it just *appears* sufficiently potentially valid to warrant discussion. It is not "idiotic".
No, it simply is not. 1) Colors can easily constitute a major portion of a trademark (IANAL). 2) Companies are obligated to protect their trademarks as closely as is reasonable, lest they lose it to the public domain (if that term is proper for non-copyright-related IP). Given that the two entities share a similar field, and that it is the same word ("mobile") that is colorized, it would be irresponsible of T-mobile to not consider this as a potential threat to their trademark. I'm not saying they would win if it came down to a court case, or even that it would be worth taking any kind of more severe legal action than what they already did, but I see no reason to assume that the request is invalid.
Indeed. I expected a nastygram, but the letter was very straight-forward and, aside from presupposing that engadget would no doubt agree to the change, fair. Probably the nicest legal letter from a company I've ever seen posted online. The reaction was overblown and unnecessary.
Actually, the AC seems to have a far better grasp on reality than you do. His post is consistent with what I have already heard on this topic from sources that I consider to be reasonably reliable, and mirrors what other slashdotters have stated. You on the other hand made a bogus argument a few comments up that demonstrates either a fundamental misunderstanding about color and the construction of monitors, or an unwillingness to declare or justify your subjective basis before launching into a rant. See http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=507416&cid=22933648 to http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=507416&cid=22934156.
Good God, that would make for a delightfully evil horror/suspense film. No antagonist, just pure setup.
I strongly suspect that, as the guy above me said, the joke is that they're totally ignoring today. But still, we had a fake story yesterday that irresponsibly came across as serious in the summary (DX11, ray tracing).
The kid is fucking eleven. I'm sorry his grasp on reality isn't what you expect it to be.
As for the first part: People (I think ESR) say learning to program in Visual Basic destroys minds. I always felt that VB simply has a way of tricking people who aren't programmers into thinking that they are, but this says nothing about the rest, except that they make up a smaller percentage. Same principle applies here. As for the second part: Sure, whatever you say (*eyeroll*).
Well sure, if this is all he accomplishes by the time he's 21. I'd assume that he's going to go to, you know, college, and if he searches for a part time job at any age before graduation, I doubt it'd be a negative that he has any form of administrative experience.
To summarize and reiterate: The kid's fucking eleven. Any activity taken on his part now is above and beyond casual expectations. Using a Microsoft product when you're young does not doom you to mediocrity. Get over yourself.
I can't fully explain it, but I really like something about that insight. Maybe it's that I wonder what I could've accomplished if I knew everything I know now back when I was 11.
The disappearance of its competition can probably be correlated with the absolute decimation of its market.
Somehow I don't think money was the first thing on Szilard's mind when he wrote that letter to FDR initiating the Manhattan project. And somehow I don't think military and intelligence agencies give a damn about intellectual property when war or national security are on their minds.
Of course it is. Taking up too many resources on a multiuser system is a technological problem, one that is solved with disk quotas and per-user cpu utilization limits. Taking up too many resources on a network is likewise a technological problem, one that should be addressed with intelligent bandwidth accounting that allows for bursts and does not mislead users as to their permitted allotment.
We shouldn't have to rely on client-side mercy, whether it's in the form of near-universal TCP congestion control or in the form of politely begging your users to not seed bittorrent 24/7. The subscriber and provider should have perfect knowledge of how much bandwidth they're using and are allowed, independent of protocol. Tack on QoS afterwards, but give the user control of their preferences and make them responsible for not screwing themselves out of usable VoIP.
That is, begin with a bandwidth rate, usage of which is guaranteed. Then tack on a burstable higher rate which is quota'd. Then give the user the ability to tag which traffic is most important to them, again putting known and reasonable quotas on this amount. Make all these requirements public instead of being intentionally vague about what users can and can not use your network for and getting mad about it afterwards.
Amen to that. Satellite radio has fairly good diversity, and spending half an hour listening to it is the best way to see how force-fed terrestrial radio is. This is also coming from a NYC-area resident.
The "I could do that in five minutes" argument works for a subset of what's called "art", and it's a shame that this detracts from the perceived merit of the rest of what's out there. I remember being infuriated when I went to the Museum of Modern Art and saw a blank piece of canvas with a slash through it being lauded in the same building that housed a Jackson Pollock piece.
Anyway, back to the point. I like the arrogance. It's nice to get away from other majors and disciplines for a moment and revel in the uniformity with which you and your classmates perceive the world. I just wouldn't recommend taking oneself too seriously at such moments. For instance, I know a professor in my school's Science Technology & Society department who *is* a walking stereotype of how others perceive his field, and I ridicule him for that (not to his face obviously). At the same time, I can see areas of my conversations with my peers that could be subject to ridicule as well (at least, if the observer could understand the implications of the technical vocabulary).
That's interesting, I didn't consider the possibility of going hybrid, leaving all non-essential stuff on hard disk and putting the system partitions in flash. Maybe I should give that a shot next time I upgrade. What do you think is the performance difference between using an expensive SSD and a normal CF card and IDE adapter?
Read the GP for context: jgarra23 was responding to CoE's post that (jokingly) implied a method of making money off gratuitous lawsuits, not to the events of the article. Parent is no troll.
Well be careful with that - if we compare "parts" to the features of a model of computation, then combining two machines with equivalent power together can yield something more powerful. For instance, I believe a push down automaton with two stacks instead of one turns out to be Turing complete. On the other hand, once you've reached Turing completeness, no (reasonable) combination of other non super-Turing parts lets you increase your computational power (that is, Turing machines are closed under composition or similar combinations).
The point is that intelligence can very well be an emergent property.
I didn't read the article until I saw the dupe and didn't realize that the professor behind this project is indeed Selmer Bringsjord, the one I leave nameless above. He's a smart man, but honestly, I disagree with most of the things he has to say. His proofs are vague and presumptuous, and his beliefs include P = NP, that classical machines cannot match human intelligence (apologies to him if I'm misstating that one), that humans can solve the halting problem, and indeed, that humans are not the product of evolution.
The one I mentioned in my previous post proceeded as follows:
1. Turing machines cannot solve the halting problem. (Established, mathematically proven)
2. Humans can solve the halting problem. (Like hell they can, but let's grant it for this argument)
3. Humans are super-Turing. (By 1 and 2)
4. No product of an algorithmic process can produce a super-Turing result. (Well...)
5. Evolution is an algorithmic process. (Sure there's some non-determinism but so what?)
6. By 3, 4, and 5, humans are not a product of evolution!
The major flaw in this, besides 2, is 4. An algorithmic process can produce a super-Turing result if it is fed super-Turing components. For instance, we can algorithmically combine an oracle machine with a regular Turing machine to produce another oracle machine. If there's some magical oracular "halting chemical element" in the universe that humans have in their brains, then there's no reason evolution or some other algorithm couldn't produce a human containing this.
I do strongly disagree with the notion that whether a machine is deterministic or nondeterministic matters in this context. We know that, mathematically, both forms of Turing machines have equal power (if one ignores computation time); everything else seems to be a matter of implementation. To favor one over the other feels almost as arbitrary as choosing between organic life and silicon - why does it matter what the mechanism of thought is if the result is the same?
But this is crucial: I don't agree with your implication that humans are necessarily nondeterministic and machines deterministic. For instance, I don't exclude the possibility that the universe itself is completely deterministic, every state in the future completely derived from any state in the past. But this doesn't detract from the worth of humans or any other intelligent being. If on the other hand we assume the opposite, I don't see why quantum computers should be considered more powerful than classical ones when it comes to AI, unless they end up defying the Church-Turing Thesis.
I do believe in "free will", but I don't think I would define the phrase in the way most would. In particular, I believe in both free will and determinism, or at least assert that there's no conflict between them. Apparent paradox: "How can you have free will if you could not possibly do otherwise?"; Answer: "You still have free will, you're just destined to will it in one particular way."
Because of their computational equivalence, I'd agree.
I don't know that anything less than a perfect simulation is sufficient.
The sensation/qualia argument is the bane of Functionalism. I suppose this really is where it comes down to personal faith. Perhaps it helps that I'm not even convinced of my own "humanity" in this sense.
Such re
Humans do tend to overvalue themselves. Descartes, in the same piece, managed to both "prove" his own existence and "prove" that animals were soulless automatons.
You're reaching levels of fallacy reserved for religious fanatics and René Descartes*. The phrase "on her/their own" is extremely misleading, as it presumes a lot about the identity of the systems in question. (If you still wish to argue this point then I strongly recommend clarifying what you mean by this phrase.) You have no business equating life support to power and cooling without allowing the same analogy between the instincts built into the nervous system and the initial boot code executed by a CPU.
* "Meditations on First Philosophy" sucks and I want the whole world to know it!
I've never heard of that test before but I can tell you it's completely bogus, as it makes no sense to propose a non-trivial machine with "no programming whatsoever". Such a machine not only couldn't learn, but it couldn't do simple tasks by rote, save by some sort of quantum physics instantaneous miracle. No, not even humans satisfy this definition, since all humans (and all things commonly considered to be alive, including virii) have programming.
> "I have always regarded this leap of logic as the biggest problem with the Turing test."
;)
But that's the point - it's not a leap of logic, it's a sufficient (and necessary?) condition for a proposed equivalence between humans and machines that Alan Turing used. Either you agree with Turing or you don't, but it's not a fallacy unless someone tries to sneak it in as a premise.
> "Just because you can't tell the difference between two things in particular circumstances doesn't mean they are the same, or functionally the same in all circumstances."
Absolutely. Let's assume for the sake of discussion we had some way to guarantee that they are functionally the same.
> "An AI could simulate a human perfectly, down to the smallest detail, and still have no actual intelligence whatsoever."
Well, that obviously depends on your personal beliefs regarding intelligence. Since I'm a Turing Functionalist, I disagree on this point - an identical machine necessarily has an identical intelligence.
> "For example, the use of 3D animation to simulate (say) an image of an aeroplane in a film doesn't mean that a 3D animated plane is the same as a real plane. But to an audience in a cinema there is no difference. To me, this is how the Turing test appears to work (or should I say, not work)"
If the animation was in fact a simulated world where all the other actors functioned as they should, then I'd argue that it is indeed a plane in that world. It's not the Test itself you're arguing with so much as the Functionalism part.
> "Another fundamental problem with Turing is this: why does a computer have to display human intelligence? An intelligent alien lifeform would fail the Turing test too. Expecting a deliberately designed bundle of wires and microchips to exhibit the same variety of intelligence as a highly evolved monkey which is adapted to hunting mammoth, reproducing to make more monkeys and killing other highly evolved monkeys is totally unrealistic."
Sure, sure. It's just that we consider humans to be intelligent (sometimes I wonder why, etc. etc., but in this context we just do), so if we can show equivalence between a machine and a human, that's sufficient to show the machine to be intelligent. Failure of this test does not necessarily mean the machine is not intelligent via equivalence with some alien creature. (I guess that answers my parenthetical question at the top about whether the Test was a necessary condition.)
> "As others have pointed out, we need a better definition of intelligence. "Able to mimic a human" just doesn't cut it."
After the above, will you understand when I say that I think it does?
The Turing Test is BS anyway. Taking it literally is like taking the Bible literally. Alan Turing proposed it just to demonstrate his point that a machine that could act exactly like a human, to the point that no one could tell the difference, should be considered a human. This is the foundation of the philosophical school of thought known as Turing Functionalism. The exact mechanisms of communication - IM communication, with a judge, etc. etc. - are missing the point, at least when overstated in the way the article summary does.
Honestly, our short message communications (online) have degenerated in form to the point that we shouldn't be surprised when a machine is able to present a reasonably incoherent fact simile, as many already do.
I have no idea why the parent is still marked troll three full hours after the post; the mods must be slow today. The parent is correct in that we can't define consciousness in a universally accepted way, and any proposed definition would seem to be somewhat arbitrary and non-scientific. In fact, this leads to some contentious arguments that mirror religious ones in form - people tend to argue based on presumptions the other party doesn't share, and fail to identify this disconnect until after their opponent rejects the simplest claim. For instance, I believe that machines can in principle be just as intelligent as humans, because humans are constructible from elementary parts, and so are machines. One of the professors here (at RPI - I go to the school mentioned in the article summary) by contrast believes that humans can solve* the halting problem, and thus are not constructed from elementary parts. (He gives a similar argument to "prove" that humans are not the product of evolution, but it requires an even shakier premise than the notion that humans can "solve" the halting problem.)
* This notion of solving the problem can't even be well formulated for humans. Turing machines are a precise mathematical model, and humans are of course not.
For a lesson on the basics of US government, watch Schoolhouse Rock or listen to a 4th grade social studies teacher. Then promptly disregard all that information as it is mechanical, elementary, and trivially irrelevant. For a lesson on the basics of US politics, check out the 1996 Simpsons Tree House of Horror episode (origin of the "Don't blame me! I voted for Kodos" line).
The rule of thumb is that the executive branch is significantly more powerful, and more transparently irresponsible, than you would think allowable. Historically, many presidents have been known to simply ignore the law when convenient. More recently, we have presidents who excuse others for illegal actions: Clinton pardoned his friends, Bush pardoned Libby, and for crying out loud, Ford pardoned Nixon. And while vetoes can be overridden by Congress if it has a high enough majority, pocket vetoes cannot be overturned (although they can only be used at specific times).
Of course, Congress is guilty of overstepping its bounds at times as well. The bottom line is that "Checks and Balances" are just words. The only thing preventing the entire system from falling apart is everyone's mutual binding distrust of one another.
Can you tell I'm bitter today?
You think that's bad? I hear security's afraid of shoes these days.