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Turing Test Success

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Re: Turing Test Success

#31
Perhaps I just asked the right questions, but I just had a lovely conversation with 'Eugene'.

I asked him a few questions like where he lived, his name, if he has brothers or sisters, if he wears glasses, etc. Eventually he started asking me questions like what I did for a living and where I lived. He also managed to form questions based on my answers.

It almost felt like a conversation. I can honestly say, I've never thought that before while talking to an AI. So far I am pretty impressed.

Re: Turing Test Success

#32

The Turing Test is a terrible measure of sapience. Generally it involves using "average people", who have been shown time and again to be overly credulous when talking to these bots. If the test is to be used at all, it should consist of computer science experts instead--people familiar with the technology and bot tricks of the trade. That the Turing Test is still used is proof that we still don't understand how to e…

That we don't understand how to define intelligence is exactly the point. That's why the Turing test is interesting.

The problem with "looking behind the curtain" is that it traditionally boils down to what I like to think of as the subtle fluid model of intelligence. If you know what is behind the curtain, then obviously it can't be intelligent, because it is not running on the right hardware, for gooey definitions of hardware, or because it doesn't have some Homunculus of Definite Understanding (Hi, Serle!), or because we can see behind the curtain and know what it is doing. Obviously, if we know what it is doing, it is not intelligent, right?

Re: Turing Test Success

#33
The Turing test is to our understanding of intelligence what sleight of hand is to our understanding of physics. Tricking people, as a goal, is not conductive to science.

A researcher claiming to have passed the Turing test instantly discredits himself as a prestidigitator looking for PR buzz. The present article is a textbook example of this.

As a side note, if you are focusing on disembodied, language-based human-like intelligence, then the paradigm you operate in is many decades behind. The Turing test was conceived at a time when the notion of thinking machines had just started to emerge --a very different time from today, where we have 60 years of AI research behind us. The Turing test has been irrelevant for longer than most AI researchers have been alive. I have never seen it used for anything else than smoke-and-mirrors PR operations.

Re: Turing Test Success

#34
post #30

Where did the 30% requirement come from? Sounds like something the contest organizers added to make it possible to "pass" without fooling 2/3 of the judges. Using a young teenager as a character also seems like a cheat unless they had other 13-year olds to be the judges. The character needs to be a peer to the judges. Most 13 year olds behave oddly enough in the opinion of most adults that it's got to be easier to cr…

30% of the time, five minute conversations, a "simulated" 13-year old? At least "the conversations were unrestricted". The Turing test is not a test . Instead, it is an operational definition of "intelligence", a very slight formalization of the idea that something is intelligent if it seems to be intelligent . As a test, it obviously has to have some kind of limits like this "competition", but as soon as you put lim…

> Instead, it is an operational definition of "intelligence"

Exactly. It's a straightforward formulation of what a strong AI would be capable of. It makes no sense to have a restricted Turing test that can be passed by a useless chatbot. It means absolutely nothing.

Re: Turing Test Success

#35

I remember reading the first chapter on an AI book during college which laid out the objectives of AI research into two schools of thought.The first school of thought believes that AI can be achieved by mimicking real conscious beings. Remember when man first tried to fly, most devices mimicked birds and failed horribly. The other school of thought believes that intelligence has well-defined principles, when discover…

> The first school of thought believes that AI can be achieved by mimicking real conscious beings

It's important to note the true meaning behind this school of thought - that mimicry and "true" intelligence are actually equivalent. Behaviorists believe this, and the validity of the Turing Test along with it.

Re: Turing Test Success

#37

The Turing test is to our understanding of intelligence what sleight of hand is to our understanding of physics. Tricking people, as a goal, is not conductive to science. A researcher claiming to have passed the Turing test instantly discredits himself as a prestidigitator looking for PR buzz. The present article is a textbook example of this. As a side note, if you are focusing on disembodied, language-based human-l…

Your opinion is not universally accepted. (Perhaps not even mainstream?).

There's an element of behaviorism which stretches back to Descartes - how can you know that I exist? That I think? You can only observe through my behavior; that my behavior mimics yours.

How then can we judge machines any other way?

Re: Turing Test Success

#38

Perhaps I just asked the right questions, but I just had a lovely conversation with 'Eugene'. I asked him a few questions like where he lived, his name, if he has brothers or sisters, if he wears glasses, etc. Eventually he started asking me questions like what I did for a living and where I lived. He also managed to form questions based on my answers. It almost felt like a conversation. I can honestly say, I've neve…

Is there somewhere online you can talk to him?

Re: Turing Test Success

#39
post #38

Perhaps I just asked the right questions, but I just had a lovely conversation with 'Eugene'. I asked him a few questions like where he lived, his name, if he has brothers or sisters, if he wears glasses, etc. Eventually he started asking me questions like what I did for a living and where I lived. He also managed to form questions based on my answers. It almost felt like a conversation. I can honestly say, I've neve…

Is there somewhere online you can talk to him?

http://www.princetonai.com/bot/bot.jsp
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