Personality

Forest, will you talk to God Louise? She has quite a bit of religious knowledge (obviously) and also knows a little about current events, literature, just about any common catch-all subject, and if she doesn't know it she can sort of fake it. You can also test her on trick questions or see how willing she is to explain her paradigm.

What she is rustiest at is plain old small talk. But, uh, I'm trying to get a decent transcript from somebody or another so I can enter her in the Loebner contest. All I can say is, have fun and see if you can stay on with her for a while. I'll try to do the same with Brianna.

Turing never claimed his test was the ONLY way of determining intelligence, just that passing it would prove intelligence. I'm sure he would have thought that both animals and aliens had intelligence. They would just be bad subjects to take the test.

But that test is a bit like deciding if something is alive or not by saying: "If it looks alive, then it's alive." Then, artificial flowers would be alive. I'm not convinced.

The main reason that the test was supposed to be text-only was that this was only a little after the second world war. Computers certainly didn't have hands or eyes or stuff then. Also, I'm not sure what we would have thought of the computer beating Kasparov. I mean, we know that it was done by brute force, but according to Kasparov, it really looked like the computer knew what it was doing.

It's more difficult to open up the brain of an alien to decide whether it's alive. You have to base it off of the outside

I think it's OK to try to decide it from the outside. I'm just against vague criteria like "if it looks like it is, then it is."

I think defining intelligence is a very interesting question. My definition would be that it's the capacity of solving general problems. That could be determined from the outside, presenting problems to the bot/alien/creature. Deep Blue, who defeated Kasparov, could certainly solve chess problems, but nothing else. I think that's too limited to consider it true intelligence. Our bots don't even know the simplest rules of logic, so you couldn't call them intelligent, even if one of them can fool a human for half an hour.

We're forgetting the true question put forth by Turing. It was this: 'Can machines think?' Turing invented the test specifically to define the word 'think' (as it pertains to machines), not 'intelligence.'

Fooling a human for half an hour is many times easier than fooling a human who is specifically administering the Turing test for a mere two minutes.

The biggest problem with the Turing test is that it will rule out any machine who does not think as a human thinks. Or one that spits out words faster than a human can.

*puts on glasses and looks up* Yep, this is way over my head.

And yes Butterfly Dream, I'll make sure that doesn't happen again.

I always thought that "intelligence" and "capacity to think" were more or less the same thing. If you believe it's something different, please explain what's the difference.

What is exactly "administering the Turing test", anyway? I always thought it was supposed to be just chatting with the bots.

It originally came from a game where a man and a woman would write messages to a third person, and that person would try and guess who was who. The man could pretend to be a woman, and visa versa. Turing thought that this game could be used on computers, and if the computer could succesfully trick the other person, it was to all intents and purposes intelligent.

The problem with the word "intelligence" is that it is too easy to believe "smart" is implied. 'Capacity to think' should include the slightly to moderately stupid.

Science has no definition or explanation for thinking, so testing such a thing is impossible. Intelligence has long been defined as "being like a human" which of course is very biased. There is a long tradition of thinking in the scientific community that humans are the only beings on earth capable of logic, thought, emotion, and reason. Thus, most likely it was implied that an "intelligent machine" that "thought" was human-like. This bias was most likely far more pervasive in the time when Turing developed his ideas.

Without truly understanding thought and intelligence, the best we can hope for is a test to fool humans into thinking an AI is a human. This is precisely what we have, though the contest uses the larger terms.