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