DailyDirt: Alternatives To The Turing Test

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Tue, Apr 7th 2015 5:00pm — Michael Ho

Artificial intelligence research has made quite a few advances, but the goalposts are always moving back. Not too long ago, people thought that games like chess and poker were far too difficult for software to play as well as humans. There are still a few games that computers can't quite play as well as humans, but that list is getting smaller all the time. Software with "general intelligence" is still a bit beyond our reach, but the Singularity could happen any moment now.

The Turing Test has made it into the mainstream media, but to the annoyance of artificial intelligence researchers, the interpretation of what this test actually demonstrates has been grossly misunderstood. There are several proposals for Turing Test alternatives that are more resistant to sneaky chat bots, but maybe we should try to figure out what human intelligence is before we devise a test for non-humans. [url]
The Winograd Schema challenge is slightly improved kind of test for linguistic comprehension. Nuance, the speech recognition firm, is sponsoring a $25,000 grand prize for solutions that perform comparably to human responses. The first question is NOT: "You're in a desert walking along in the sand when all of the sudden you look down, and you see a tortoise, it's crawling toward you. You reach down, you flip the tortoise over on it's back. The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can’t, not without your help. But you're not helping. Why is that?" [url]
Eugene Goostman is the name of a simulated 13yo Ukrainian boy that fooled some people into thinking it was a real human. Artificial intelligence isn't supposed to just fool people. This chat bot might have fooled some humans in a 5 minute long conversation, but it's not actually revolutionary. Someday we might have software that can converse naturally for indefinite periods of time, but we're not there yet. [url]

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Filed Under: ai, artificial intelligence, chat bot, cognitive computing, eugene goostman, general intelligence, iq, natural language processing, speech recognition, turing test, voight-kampff, winograd schema challenge
Companies: nuance

5 Comments

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Anonymous Coward, 7 Apr 2015 @ 7:15pm

The Politician Turing Test
is a lot easier to pass.

A chatbot could beat most politicians in an online debate.

Perhaps chatbots wouldn't cost as much to elect?
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- anon, 8 Apr 2015 @ 10:19am
  
  Re: The Politician Turing Test
  There are plenty of humans that wouldn't pass a Turing test.
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  - John Fenderson (profile), 8 Apr 2015 @ 10:39am
    
    Re: Re: The Politician Turing Test
    Eliza> What does that suggest to you?
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Anonymous Coward, 7 Apr 2015 @ 7:19pm

"The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over"

But they don't beat their legs to turn over, they use their long necks to push off the ground with.
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JimG, 8 Apr 2015 @ 10:51am

>maybe we should try to figure out what human intelligence is
>before we devise a test for non-humans.

Good luck with that one. On the surface that seems to make sense, but it’s kind of like saying “maybe we should figure out what God is before we decide how to be a good person.”

The whole point of the Turing test is that since we have historically failed in defining things like “thinking” or “intelligence” we replace these unclear definitionsJim with something that is “expressed in relatively unambiguous words.” Turing suggested a better question is "Are there imaginable digital computers which would do well in the imitation game?”

In
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