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Turing Test Success

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41–50 of 166 posts

Re: Turing Test Success

#41
post #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.

I think it might actually be in Civ5 that I first heard the following quote:

"Asking whether a computer can think is about as useful as asking whether a submarine can swim."

I think this is fairly insightful and relevant.

Re: Turing Test Success

#43
When people imagine what a Turing Test conversation would look like, they frequently underestimate the conversation. I find Dennet's example of an imaginary Turing Test from Consciousness Explained to be a good counterexample:

Judge: Did you hear about the Irishman who found a magic lamp? When he rubbed it a genie appeared and granted him three wishes. “I’ll have a pint of Guiness!” the Irishman replied and immediately it appeared. The Irishman eagerly set to sipping and then gulping, but the level of Guiness in the glass was always magically restored. After a while the genie became impatient. “Well, what about your second wish?” he asked. Replied the Irishman between gulps, “Oh well, I guess I’ll have another one of these.”

CHINESE ROOM: Very funny. No, I hadn’t heard it– but you know I find ethnic jokes in bad taste. I laughed in spite of myself, but really, I think you should find other topics for us to discuss.

J: Fair enough but I told you the joke because I want you to explain it to me.

CR: Boring! You should never explain jokes.

J: Nevertheless, this is my test question. Can you explain to me how and why the joke “works”?

CR: If you insist. You see, it depends on the assumption that the magically refilling glass will go on refilling forever, so the Irishman has all the stout he can ever drink. So he hardly has a reason for wanting a duplicate but he is so stupid (that’s the part I object to) or so besotted by the alcohol that he doesn’t recognize this, and so, unthinkingly endorsing his delight with his first wish come true, he asks for seconds. These background assumptions aren’t true, of course, but just part of the ambient lore of joke-telling, in which we suspend our disbelief in magic and so forth. By the way we could imagine a somewhat labored continuation in which the Irishman turned out to be “right” in his second wish after all, perhaps he’s planning to throw a big party and one glass won’t refill fast enough to satisfy all his thirsty guests (and it’s no use saving it up in advance– we all know how stale stout loses its taste). We tend not to think of such complications which is part of the explanation of why jokes work. Is that enough?

Dennett: "The fact is that any program that could actually hold up its end in the conversation depicted would have to be an extraordinary supple, sophisticated, and multilayered system, brimming with “world knowledge” and meta-knowledge and meta-meta-knowledge about its own responses, the likely responses of its interlocutor, and much, much more…. Maybe the billions of actions of all those highly structured parts produce genuine understanding in the system after all."

I'm sure they didn't get anywhere near this with their 13-yr-old simulation. But this gives an idea of the heights AI has to scale before it can regularly pass the Turing Test.

Re: Turing Test Success

#44
The point missed is the Turing test was an abstract thought experiment into how we perceive the presence of intelligence.

If a decade or so of social media (whatever that means) has proven anything, its that very little intelligence occurs in virtually all conversations.

The meta Turing test is being failed by many people who think it (a concrete implementation of it) means something. Much like actually building a well sealed box with a cat, a radioisotope source, and a geiger counter wouldn't actually be a "great step forward for Quantum Physics" in 2014. Any more than making a little anthropomorphic horned robot and having him divert fast "hot" molecules one direction or slow "cold" molecules another would be a great step forward for thermodynamics in 2014.

The value of a thought experiment is realized when its proposed, not when someone makes a science fair demonstration of the abstract idea.

Re: Turing Test Success

#46

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…

Next time it's up, try asking a few of these: http://www.cs.nyu.edu/davise/papers/WS.html

Re: Turing Test Success

#47
post #26

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…

Most likely from here: >It will simplify matters for the reader if I explain first my own beliefs in the matter. Consider first the more accurate form of the question. I believe that in about fifty years' time it will be possible, to programme computers, with a storage capacity of about 109, to make them play the imitation game so well that an average interrogator will not have more than 70 per cent chance of making…

Is he talking about 109 bits? Because that seems pretty impossible to me.

Re: Turing Test Success

#48
post #3

I appreciate HN's rule about brief, non-sensational submission titles, but perhaps this one's taken it to the point of absurdism.

It was the submitter's title, not a mod edit, if that matters. The submitter did a good job, because the rest of the title ("marks milestone in computing history") is certainly linkbait and arguably misleading. Having it there would likely have made this thread a lower-quality controversy than it currently is. HN threads are surprisingly sensitive to initial conditions.

Edit: Oh, and considering how many fluff press articles are showing up about this [1], the submitter also showed exemplary taste in source selection. Yay, stevejalim!

1. https://hn.algolia.com/?q=turing+test#!/story/sort_by_date/0...

Re: Turing Test Success

#49
post #47
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most likely from here: >It will simplify matters for the reader if I explain first my own beliefs in the matter. Consider first the more accurate form of the question. I believe that in about fifty years' time it will be possible, to programme computers, with a storage capacity of about 109, to make them play the imitation game so well that an average interrogator will not have more than 70 per cent chance of making…

Is he talking about 109 bits? Because that seems pretty impossible to me.

More likely 1E9

Re: Turing Test Success

#50
post #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?

Your spec is over generalized into all forms of observation and comparison. The Turing test is very limited into written 1 on 1 conversation as culturally conceived by humans. There's no particular reason to assume a non-human intelligence would have a human-like culture of communication, which kind of breaks it.

Here's a fun idea for several intelligence tests we can call the VLM tests that have nothing to do with two way conversation like the Turing test.

Given "a machine intelligence" spin up a couple million of them in a "fun" simulation environment and see how much thermodynamic dis-equilibrium they generate by whatever social interaction they see fit to apply to each other. Is it as interesting (aka thermodynamic dis-equilibrium) as a GoL or a real world anthill or a Dwarf Fortress or a Google Earth? Is their simulated culture as interesting to read as HN, or as dumb as youtube comments (which used to be the gold standard of dumbness in social media)

Assuming you can crack the literary code (if any exists) another game to play is extract the meme-flow of a culture of AI vs a culture of 4chan and vote for whichever meme came from a more intelligent group. This is Turing-ish WRT human observers majority vote and such, but is completely non-interactive, merely humans, or even trained sociologists, trying to figure out given two memes which is more intelligent.

Getting out the Sherlock Holmes hat, its possible to determine if an artifact came from an intelligence without talking to the intelligence for awhile. I suspect archeologists have really fun debates on this topic. Is this a stone hammer or merely a peculiar river rock, etc.

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