Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

My Conversation with “Eugene Goostman”

scottaaronson.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 81 posts

Re: My Conversation with “Eugene Goostman”

#31

Post by boyter »

For fun I ran Eugene against Eliza to see what sort of nonsense it would come back with. Below is a quick extract of the "conversation"

  Eliza: Is it important to you that your attitude to I ?
  Eugene: It is highly possible. It is highly possible.
  Eliza: Lets discuss further why your feelings right now.
  Eugene: Just because 2 plus 2 is 5! Wonna ask me something more?
  Eliza: Don't any other reasons come to mind ?
  Eugene: Is it a kind of manace? Maybe, let's talk about something else? What would you like to discuss?
  Eliza: Why the uncertain tone ?
  Eugene: Why? Just because! :) Why? Just because! :)
  Eliza: Why do you ask ?
  Eugene: Oh, but why not? Well, let's go on though.
  Eliza: Are such questions much on your mind ?
  Eugene: Who knows... Well, let's go on though.
  Eliza: Have you asked such questions before ?
  Eugene: I would rather not talk about it if you don't mind. Oh, what a fruitful conversation;-)
  Eliza: What would you do if I don't mind ?
I think it would be more interesting to wash each reply to Eugene through a translator from English to Japanese and back. Given a more powerful bot the Eliza it could produce some interesting results.

Re: My Conversation with “Eugene Goostman”

#33

Post by JackC »

I had the “conversation” below with the version of Eugene Goostman available at http://default-environment-sdqm3mrmp4.elasticbeanstalk.com/. It’s possible that there’s a more recent version somewhere else, but this is the only version I was able to access. Even then, the site was constantly down ...

Setting aside whether this is the same version of the software, is Eugene CPU-constrained? The press release described it as running on a "supercomputer." A conversation with an overloaded Amazon instance might be totally different.

Re: My Conversation with “Eugene Goostman”

#34

Post by Houshalter »

V-2 wrote: post #9

Clever as this is, how could it really fool anyone (aware of the existence of bots)?

Well this is a much older version of the bot I believe. Additionally most people do not ask adversarial questions, but rather try to have a normal conversation, which bots are quite good at. You also have to have prior knowledge about how chatbots work in order to know what kinds of things it is bad at (e.g. common sense knowledge about the world, which most people wouldn't think to ask about or would come up in conversation normally.)

A Watson like QA system could potentially fix that weakness and answer the questions he asked. The press release described it as running on a supercomputer, so it's possible they were doing something like that. But then someone would find another weakness in it, and so on.

Re: My Conversation with “Eugene Goostman”

#35

Post by matnewton85 »

Morendil wrote: post #27
matnewton85 wrote: post #19

I had an actual conversation with Eugene Goostman as if I was meeting a 13 year old from the Ukraine. And Eugene nailed it. He introduced himself, ask me polite questions, I asked him polite questions, and we developed a slightly broken conversation, but yes, a conversation. The idea of this is not "try to break the robot", the idea is "if you ran into this robot in real life and it was masquerading as a human, would…

> The idea of this is not "try to break the robot" Think of it this way. If you want to learn what constitutes strong chess play, will you learn best from playing a) yourself or b) a much stronger player? Having a "collaborative" exchange with a chatbot is of the same strength as playing chess with yourself, for the purposes of investigating what "thinking" consists of. The Turing Test is useful precisely when we are…

Ok, I think this is just a perspective thing.

You're (most likely) coming from a CS background, I come from a user testing background.

If someone sits me down and says "use my site, have a conversation with a 13 year old Ukrainian".. I start having a conversation with a 13 year old Ukrainian.

Someone sits a CS major down with Eugene, the 13 year old Ukrainian, he'll drop references to AI reserch from the 60s. Something that probably one or two Ukrainian kids could ever answer.

Re: My Conversation with “Eugene Goostman”

#36

Post by rdvrk »

If I were to chat with a random person online, and their conversation starter was "Which is bigger, a shoebox or Mount Everest?", I'd probably ignore that - and disconnect after a couple more "witty" questions. Eugene is just trying to be nice.

As someone said, it gets better if you try having a normal conversation.

I'd like to see what would happen if the people who created this let a real 13 year old boy chat with people, but announcing it as the supercomputer version.

Re: My Conversation with “Eugene Goostman”

#37

Post by kenjackson »

gamegoblin wrote: post #29
kenjackson wrote: post #25

A twist on the Turing Test that would be fun. Drop in 19 people and 1 AI into a chatroom, and then try to determine who is the AI. A lot of these adversarial questions may come off looking more like an aggressive AI than a human.

I do like the idea, but all it would require is at least 2 people putting forward group strategies. For example, one person says "everyone repeat your username", so everyone does. Of course, the one who said this could be the bot, so another person would then have to put forth a different challenge (something similar -- repeat your username backwards, or something).

What if I told the humans there was 1 AI, but there were really 15 AIs and just a few humans. How many humans would volunteer, "There may be only 1 AI, but many seemed just as inhuman."

Re: My Conversation with “Eugene Goostman”

#39

Post by marcus_holmes »

matnewton85 wrote: post #35
Morendil wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The idea of this is not "try to break the robot" Think of it this way. If you want to learn what constitutes strong chess play, will you learn best from playing a) yourself or b) a much stronger player? Having a "collaborative" exchange with a chatbot is of the same strength as playing chess with yourself, for the purposes of investigating what "thinking" consists of. The Turing Test is useful precisely when we are…

Ok, I think this is just a perspective thing. You're (most likely) coming from a CS background, I come from a user testing background. If someone sits me down and says "use my site, have a conversation with a 13 year old Ukrainian".. I start having a conversation with a 13 year old Ukrainian. Someone sits a CS major down with Eugene, the 13 year old Ukrainian, he'll drop references to AI reserch from the 60s. Somethi…

but these bots won't cope with not being able to answer, because the human response (to learn) isn't open to them. If you sit down with a human and start talking about something they don't know, then usually (in a situation free from conflict or other emotional prompts) their curiosity prompts them to start asking questions and building a mental model of the subject that prompts further questions and they learn about the subject. The conversation builds on the learning and a real progression of thought ensues.

The chatbots can't do this, except in the most limited of ways ($job="CS scientist"), so they don't appear human.

Re: My Conversation with “Eugene Goostman”

#40

Post by Houshalter »

baddox wrote: post #18
jonsterling wrote: post #15

Lmao that people are still taking AI seriously.

What exactly are you suggesting with the implication that people shouldn't take AI seriously? That AI research is a waste of time and money? That "strong AI," however it's defined, will never happen?

Some people have the strange, sometimes religiously motivated, belief that human intelligence has some vague magical property which by definition can't be reproduced in mere physical machines.

Otherwise it's just arguing about how difficult AI will be which is very hard to estimate. Some people look at previous failures and lack of progress in AI and extrapolate from that. But progress is rarely linear and computers are only now getting fast enough to handle the really cool stuff.

Post reply on HN