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Artificial intelligence came another step closer to reality this weekend after a computer came within five per cent of passing the Turing Test which evaluates a system's ability to demonstrate intelligence.The Turing Test is named after mathematician Alan Turing whose 1950 paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence stated that, if enough people cannot reliably differentiate between a human and a machine during a natural language conversation, the machine can be considered intelligent.
No machine has yet managed to deceive the 30 per cent of interrogators required to pass the Turing Test.However, at this weekend's annual Loebner Prize competition at the University of Reading, one system, dubbed Elbot, managed the most successful score yet, fooling 25 per cent of the judges.
[edited by: tedster at 7:32 pm (utc) on Oct. 13, 2008]
[edit reason] fixed typo [/edit]
[edited by: Anyango at 6:48 pm (utc) on Oct. 13, 2008]
Way back when Weizenbaum wrote ELIZA in 1967, his secretary would close the door, get on his computer and tell ELIZA about all her personal problems. That might not be a Turing Test specifically, but it sure seems like a computer convinced a human it was "intelligent".
The judges in the Loebner test specifically try to trip up the AI, including the use of nonsense strings and other tricks... tactics never imagined by Turing. He thought the test would be a normal conversation that followed normal conversational rules.
As a matter of fact, the (educational) differences between humans have reached a terrifying level meanwhile, not only worldwide, but also within the industrialized countries.
I am pretty sure, that I personally will be able to make any machine fail the turing test for quite some time, simply because I have learned about the principal weakness of turing machines: the halting problem, the Epimenides-paradoxon, any "strange loop" as Hofstadter called it. It shouldn't be too difficult to turn conversation to a related subject and guess by the anwers whether the opposing partner will cope with the problems beyond logical consistency involved.
But I am also sure, that many people have meanwhile given up trying to "understand computers." Particularly our children, who grow up with machines being able to perform so many fascinating tasks. Think of e.g. your last conversation with some staff discussing mistakes or inconsistencies in your electricity- or gas-bill. This general "our-computer-is-always-right-" mentality is terribly widespread and hardly ever reflected.
Only a very small percentage of our population has kept themselves a feeling of "superiority" over machines, and - which is even worse - don't ever think about it. This is, what is most frightening, because "it's all in your head."
This is the knife in the back of humanism.
I don't think that Elbot was necessarily the most sophisticated of these but he did have something that the other, arguably better, robots did not - a personality.
As such he was my personal fave and I talked to him quite a bit :)
I went through a phase of chatting to these bots (I was obviously a bit bored at the time!) but it was quite interesting.
Helen, this confirms my belief that people living in Devon are a bit suspect ;)
people living in Devon are a bit suspect
Now now, I'm not from Plymouth you know ;)
