DailyDirt: Alternatives To The Turing Test

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

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