X-Message-Number: 17897 Date: Sun, 11 Nov 2001 11:06:07 -0500 (EST) From: Charles Platt <> Subject: Turing test Dave Pizer asks about the Turing Test. While I dread yet another lengthy and totally inconclusive debate about mind/machine abilities here, I have to note that I am one of the few people in the world who has actually participated in a Turing Test. I wrote about it for Wired magazine, and the text is archived at: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.04/turing_pr.html My firmly held belief is that when (not if) a computer can give responses that an observer finds indistinguishable from human responses, the whole silly debate about consciousness, self-awareness, and other vague concepts which have been invented by people's minds to describe the minds themselves (i.e. a totally self-referential exercise) ... will be over. For an upcoming book on AI, I have written a chapter describing the world's first (so far, fictitious) Gnirut Test, in which machines debate whether it is possible for a human to simulate computer intelligence. Naturally, to make it a "fair test" the machines have to rule out certain types of questions, such as those which would require computationally intensive operations (code breaking, inverting large matrices, etc). This of course is comparable to the rules in current Turing Tests, which rule out open-topic questions that are considered too human-oriented. In fact, the more I thought about the Gnirut Test, the more convinced I became that the notion that human intelligence is somehow unique and irreplacable is a narcissistic conceit probably dating back to the elitist Christian dogma which places humanity on a higher plane than animals. For what it's worth, I have little doubt that my cat is conscious by any of the usual definitions, and if I had a year or two to spare, I believe I could write a natural-language-processing program that would appear to be conscious. Currently online you can have conversations with "bots" that do a fair job of simulating human interaction. For a discussion list of issues relating to AI, try http://alicebot.org/mailingLists.html To interact with A.L.I.C.E. (Turing test winner) go to http://www.alicebot.org/ and click on the option "Talk to A.L.I.C.E." For an overview of currently available Net agents (with rankings), try www.agentland.com --Charles Platt Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=17897