10 ms·

By 2029 no computer will have passed the Turing Test

34 points by dmitriy_ko 15y ago

unimpressive 15y ago
Theres far more interesting implications for humanity riding on this bet than twenty thousand dollars going to charity.
- zitterbewegung 15y ago
  That is assuming the Turing test is a good test for intelligence.
iRobot 15y ago
But I already have, human dudes
dws 15y ago
By 2029, and increasing number of humans will fail the Turing Test.
- yalimkgerger 15y ago
  this is just brilliant. i just had to write a comment to appreciate.
jhuni 15y ago
Why would a computer pass the turing test? We haven't made much progress in building intelligent machines since the late AI winter.
- batista 15y ago
  You are forgetting Clippy, the Office assistant.
- glenra 15y ago
  > We haven't made much progress in building intelligent machines since the late AI winter. We haven't? We got the AI winter because DARPA was for a while willing to fund projects that made outrageous promises, so they got outrageous promises that nobody could possibly deliver on and eventually gave up. I mean, they were funding people who wanted to do things like build semi-autonomous robots that could drive a car to deliver supplies or fly a plane to do air reconnoissance or wheel around to sweep a field for mines. They funded claims that computers would be able to do speaker-independent voice recognition. Computer programs could beat the best human players at a game of chess. Or imagine a computer program that had enough common knowledge indexed and accessible that it could win contests that involve wordplay and trivia questions. Wait, all that stuff has happened already, much of it just in the last few years. The real problem with AI is it's defined to be "stuff we can't do yet". As soon as we manage to do one of those things, it stops being called "AI". In short, I like Kurzweil's odds on this one. 2029 is a long time away in computer years and we've made a heck of a lot of progress. And he's right that humans think linearly. Exponential growth curves just aren't intuitive to us, so we underestimate what a reasonable amount of progress on a long-term goal looks like. (IBM's win at Jeopardy, Apple's Siri launch, and Google's self-driving cars are all things that happened since Ray made his prediction. Are these not AI progress?)
  - jhuni 15y ago
    I am not easily impressed. We wouldn't have any need for driverless cars in the first place, if we just had well designed designed cities. Furthermore, Siri and Watson are just symbol shifting applications which work for iOS and SUSE Linux. They are not much more impressive then similar symbol shifting applications that we available a few decades ago. I don't believe that the von neumann architecture, of which all the applications you mentioned are a part, is ever going to yield anything more then applications with sophisticated symbol shuffling systems which are actually totally stupid behind the scenes. At least before the AI winter, we had impressive AI hardware, including the Lisp machines. Now just because we have done a pretty poor job doesn't mean things have to continue to be this way in the future. DARPA is currently working to develop memristors, which may become the future of AI. Sadly, DARPA isn't getting nearly enough funding. http://www.engadget.com/2009/07/14/are-memristors-the-future-of-artifical-intelligence-darpa-think/ http://www.engadget.com/2009/07/14/are-memristors-the-future... To be realistic, Ray Kurzweil's conviction that there will be strong AI in his lifetime is just wishful thinking. Feel free to prove me wrong.
- baddox 15y ago
  Using any functional, practical definition of "artificial intelligence" that I've ever heard, we have certainly made a lot of progress since the late AI winter. It sounds like you're using the unfortunate definition that essentially defines any task as "not requiring intelligence" the instant a machine is able to perform it well. This has been done with voice recognition, facial recognition, music composition, etc., and is actually one of the main reasons we even had the AI winter.
  - jhuni 15y ago
    What I meant to state in my post is that so far I have not seen "a lot of progress." Feel free to show me anything that may change my mind.
  - Dylan16807 15y ago
    I don't think that's a very good argument. Okay, so let's say we used to think it took intelligence to recognize voice/face. Then we figured out a way to do it! Oh man, intelligence, right? Well, no. We realized that you can stick the voice through a spectrograph and measure the peaks, that's certainly not intelligence. And that you can detect the edges of bits of faces pretty easily and then compare various ratios for similarity. That's clever on the part of the algorithm designers but nothing intellect-related. I've never heard anyone say that music requires intelligence. Creativity maybe. But I can make a very simple program that has a bunch of hard-coded music patterns that it picks from and nests randomly. It can 'creatively' output trillions of different songs and clearly has nothing even approaching intelligence. Intelligence is not about what an algorithm can mechanically do. It's about comprehensive world-modeling that can predict and communicate with other agents. If something can be coded in a month by a grad student to run on an 8086 then I feel comfortable saying it's not AI. Edit: added the word mechanically to be clearer
    - glenra 15y ago
      When it comes to face/voice recognition, what makes you think people are doing anything more clever? Our brains seem to have edge and shape detection modules too, do they not? Is it not knowing the algorithm that makes what we do seem "intelligent?
kruhft 15y ago
Cleverbot, supposedly has passed the Turing test. I have my doubts, but there is something to say about this Internet accomplishment. There will always be doubt about passing this test as it is not mathematical proof, which is probably why Turing proposed it.
- batista 15y ago
  Cleverbot, supposedly has passed the Turing test. I seriously doubt it. Here's a conversation I just had with it: Me: What's your name? CB: My name? Me: Yes. CB: What's your name? Me: Suzan. CB: Nope. Me: Nope what? CB: Nope, allessander is not my name. This is sub-Eliza quality...
  - unimpressive 15y ago
    The version brought to the test had more computing power for the one conversation, and other tune-ups IIRC. EDIT: http://cleverbot.com/human http://cleverbot.com/human "Cleverbot was given more processing power for this test than it can be online. It had two dedicated, fast computers with solid state drives while talking to just 1 or 2 people at once. Online there are often 1000 people talking to each machine. We know you'd all love to talk to it the powerful version, but we need a lot more servers first! "
    - Jach 15y ago
      Thanks for the link. I had similar thoughts to the original downvoted commenter. I talked to one of the various IM bots in 2006, and they've been around a lot longer than that, and I thought that apart from its constant advertising to me it was remarkably human-like especially when it sometimes used 'u' instead of 'you'. If it had more processing power and memory, a better memory, and didn't have a goal of making money through advertising, I thought back then it had a decent chance at fooling humans. That's all the Turing Test is, it's fooling humans, and humans are incredibly easy to fool--you don't need human level intelligence to fool one. Just several months ago I only realized that a response I got on a craigslist posting was made by a bot after I replied and it replied back with an almost word-for-word copy of its original message (and urged me to fill out a form of personal info). Simple hacks like avoiding repeating the same things, remembering information shared to whom and to you from whom, and the occasional intentional grammatical error go a long way to trick the human. I think we could have had multiple Turing Test passes over the past couple years if that was actually an important goal. But I think most people in AI realize there are more interesting problems to work on than AI PR so projects like CleverBot aren't given top priority.
batista 15y ago
Despite being so clever, Ray Kurzweil is also an obsessed idiot on the topic of AI and the Singularity.
- md224 15y ago
  While I wouldn't go so far as to call him an "idiot," I do think he should be shifting his focus towards emergent phenomena on the Internet rather than a single silicon mind in a box. He's stuck in a 20th century perspective.
wololo 15y ago
Andrew Ng's work is pretty neat: http://youtube.com/watch?v=ZmNOAtZIgIk http://youtube.com/watch?v=ZmNOAtZIgIk
FollowSteph3 15y ago
We also have to remember that the Turing test isn't a real measure of intelligence. After all a computer following rules is NOT any more intelligent than the rules themselves. For example, if someone gave me a ton of rules on how to convert sentences from English to another language, and the output was amazing, would that mean I'm intelligent? Not likely, just that I can follow the language conversion rules. I think the issue is that too much emphasis is being put on Turing tests as a measure of intelligence when in fact it's really more a measure of how well a computer can follow conversations and social norms. Just because you can fool a real person, doesn't mean you're intelligently interacting with that person. Just like if I can fool another person I can speak another language by following translation rules, it doesn't actually mean I can speak the other language at all!
- unimpressive 15y ago
  I assume your talking about the Chinese Room? (LINK: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room) I actually agree, but for different reasons. I don't think human judges (That is, NORMAL human judges, non-geeks.) are a good measure of an entities intelligence. I personally have managed to convince at least one person that I'm a machine. Sufficiently good pattern matching to produce reasonable-enough sounding sentences would probably fool most casual observers. For me, the validity to a turing test relies heavily on how long and under how much pressure the A.I has to keep up it's illusion of humanity. A more objective test of intelligence would be nice though.
  - FollowSteph3 15y ago
    Yes, I meant the Chinese Room. I couldn't remember the exact term. Thank you for that! One test I heard of that sounded pretty promising is the ability of the computer to discover new patterns in existing data. Not just pattern matching, because that's possible without intelligence, but to discover new patterns from the existing data and use those new patterns to correctly predict the future. Now that's incredibly hard to do!!
    - codex 15y ago
montecarl 15y ago
Lets assume that humans are complex molecular machines. That is our bodies obey the laws of physics and are made of atoms that behave in predictable ways. If we know what we are made of (the molecules and how they are arranged) and how these molecules can be modeled (i.e. quantum mechanics) then it is only a matter of time until an entire human can be modeled on a computer. Once you can model the entire body, then you can have a computer that can pass the Turing test, because it more or less is human. If humans can be modeled as deterministic systems that follow physical laws, then computers will simulate them at some point in the future.
- grannyg00se 15y ago
  There are two problems that I can see here. First, the complexity in the physics/chemistry of our molecular machines is such that "only a matter of time" may extend longer than the time span of our species' existence. Second, it is completely possibly that we are more than molecular machines. There may be an aspect to our functioning that is beyond the physical. That aspect of our existence may not be possible to replicate.
  - baddox 15y ago
    > There may be an aspect to our functioning that is beyond the physical. That aspect of our existence may not be possible to replicate. What does "beyond the physical" even mean? I assume you mean something "supernatural," meaning something that is "true/real," yet impossible to study or even verify empirically.
    - grannyg00se 15y ago
      Beyond the physical meaning properties that are unable to be replicated by manipulating physical atoms and molecules. I wouldn't call them "supernatural" at all because (assuming they do exist) they are absolutely a natural and even necessary part of life. I would assume they would be possible to verify in some way once we've reached the stage where hard AI is nearly achieved.
majmun 15y ago
I haven't yet seen bot that could answer question about specific setting that you are in when talking to it. for example if i ask bot to repeat what i ask it just before this. it can't tell. because bots like cleverbot operates by crowdsourcing answers and than parroting it randomly. Also when i ask it same question multiple times I get different answers. Maybe bots should store procedures in their database and not just crowdsourced answers. and keep context of current session. or something. They maybe passed the turing test But that just convinced me that Turing test really means nothing. You can't really determine anything for sure with turing test but only probability. (many humans acts or are stupid, if machine is stupid some may decide that machine is like human) What i would like to see more instead of machine passing turing test is building machine species that could survive in nature, if it can survive autonomously like some kind of animal than this machine species could be said to be intelligent.

34 points by dmitriy_ko 15y ago

unimpressive 15y ago

Theres far more interesting implications for humanity riding on this bet than twenty thousand dollars going to charity.

zitterbewegung 15y ago
That is assuming the Turing test is a good test for intelligence.

iRobot 15y ago

But I already have, human dudes

dws 15y ago

By 2029, and increasing number of humans will fail the Turing Test.

yalimkgerger 15y ago
this is just brilliant. i just had to write a comment to appreciate.

jhuni 15y ago

Why would a computer pass the turing test? We haven't made much progress in building intelligent machines since the late AI winter.

batista 15y ago
You are forgetting Clippy, the Office assistant.
glenra 15y ago
> We haven't made much progress in building intelligent machines since the late AI winter. We haven't? We got the AI winter because DARPA was for a while willing to fund projects that made outrageous promises, so they got outrageous promises that nobody could possibly deliver on and eventually gave up. I mean, they were funding people who wanted to do things like build semi-autonomous robots that could drive a car to deliver supplies or fly a plane to do air reconnoissance or wheel around to sweep a field for mines. They funded claims that computers would be able to do speaker-independent voice recognition. Computer programs could beat the best human players at a game of chess. Or imagine a computer program that had enough common knowledge indexed and accessible that it could win contests that involve wordplay and trivia questions. Wait, all that stuff has happened already, much of it just in the last few years. The real problem with AI is it's defined to be "stuff we can't do yet". As soon as we manage to do one of those things, it stops being called "AI". In short, I like Kurzweil's odds on this one. 2029 is a long time away in computer years and we've made a heck of a lot of progress. And he's right that humans think linearly. Exponential growth curves just aren't intuitive to us, so we underestimate what a reasonable amount of progress on a long-term goal looks like. (IBM's win at Jeopardy, Apple's Siri launch, and Google's self-driving cars are all things that happened since Ray made his prediction. Are these not AI progress?)
- jhuni 15y ago
  I am not easily impressed. We wouldn't have any need for driverless cars in the first place, if we just had well designed designed cities. Furthermore, Siri and Watson are just symbol shifting applications which work for iOS and SUSE Linux. They are not much more impressive then similar symbol shifting applications that we available a few decades ago. I don't believe that the von neumann architecture, of which all the applications you mentioned are a part, is ever going to yield anything more then applications with sophisticated symbol shuffling systems which are actually totally stupid behind the scenes. At least before the AI winter, we had impressive AI hardware, including the Lisp machines. Now just because we have done a pretty poor job doesn't mean things have to continue to be this way in the future. DARPA is currently working to develop memristors, which may become the future of AI. Sadly, DARPA isn't getting nearly enough funding. http://www.engadget.com/2009/07/14/are-memristors-the-future-of-artifical-intelligence-darpa-think/ http://www.engadget.com/2009/07/14/are-memristors-the-future... To be realistic, Ray Kurzweil's conviction that there will be strong AI in his lifetime is just wishful thinking. Feel free to prove me wrong.
baddox 15y ago
Using any functional, practical definition of "artificial intelligence" that I've ever heard, we have certainly made a lot of progress since the late AI winter. It sounds like you're using the unfortunate definition that essentially defines any task as "not requiring intelligence" the instant a machine is able to perform it well. This has been done with voice recognition, facial recognition, music composition, etc., and is actually one of the main reasons we even had the AI winter.
- jhuni 15y ago
  What I meant to state in my post is that so far I have not seen "a lot of progress." Feel free to show me anything that may change my mind.
- Dylan16807 15y ago
  I don't think that's a very good argument. Okay, so let's say we used to think it took intelligence to recognize voice/face. Then we figured out a way to do it! Oh man, intelligence, right? Well, no. We realized that you can stick the voice through a spectrograph and measure the peaks, that's certainly not intelligence. And that you can detect the edges of bits of faces pretty easily and then compare various ratios for similarity. That's clever on the part of the algorithm designers but nothing intellect-related. I've never heard anyone say that music requires intelligence. Creativity maybe. But I can make a very simple program that has a bunch of hard-coded music patterns that it picks from and nests randomly. It can 'creatively' output trillions of different songs and clearly has nothing even approaching intelligence. Intelligence is not about what an algorithm can mechanically do. It's about comprehensive world-modeling that can predict and communicate with other agents. If something can be coded in a month by a grad student to run on an 8086 then I feel comfortable saying it's not AI. Edit: added the word mechanically to be clearer
  - glenra 15y ago
    When it comes to face/voice recognition, what makes you think people are doing anything more clever? Our brains seem to have edge and shape detection modules too, do they not? Is it not knowing the algorithm that makes what we do seem "intelligent?

kruhft 15y ago

Cleverbot, supposedly has passed the Turing test. I have my doubts, but there is something to say about this Internet accomplishment. There will always be doubt about passing this test as it is not mathematical proof, which is probably why Turing proposed it.

batista 15y ago
Cleverbot, supposedly has passed the Turing test. I seriously doubt it. Here's a conversation I just had with it: Me: What's your name? CB: My name? Me: Yes. CB: What's your name? Me: Suzan. CB: Nope. Me: Nope what? CB: Nope, allessander is not my name. This is sub-Eliza quality...
- unimpressive 15y ago
  The version brought to the test had more computing power for the one conversation, and other tune-ups IIRC. EDIT: http://cleverbot.com/human http://cleverbot.com/human "Cleverbot was given more processing power for this test than it can be online. It had two dedicated, fast computers with solid state drives while talking to just 1 or 2 people at once. Online there are often 1000 people talking to each machine. We know you'd all love to talk to it the powerful version, but we need a lot more servers first! "
  - Jach 15y ago
    Thanks for the link. I had similar thoughts to the original downvoted commenter. I talked to one of the various IM bots in 2006, and they've been around a lot longer than that, and I thought that apart from its constant advertising to me it was remarkably human-like especially when it sometimes used 'u' instead of 'you'. If it had more processing power and memory, a better memory, and didn't have a goal of making money through advertising, I thought back then it had a decent chance at fooling humans. That's all the Turing Test is, it's fooling humans, and humans are incredibly easy to fool--you don't need human level intelligence to fool one. Just several months ago I only realized that a response I got on a craigslist posting was made by a bot after I replied and it replied back with an almost word-for-word copy of its original message (and urged me to fill out a form of personal info). Simple hacks like avoiding repeating the same things, remembering information shared to whom and to you from whom, and the occasional intentional grammatical error go a long way to trick the human. I think we could have had multiple Turing Test passes over the past couple years if that was actually an important goal. But I think most people in AI realize there are more interesting problems to work on than AI PR so projects like CleverBot aren't given top priority.

batista 15y ago

Despite being so clever, Ray Kurzweil is also an obsessed idiot on the topic of AI and the Singularity.

md224 15y ago
While I wouldn't go so far as to call him an "idiot," I do think he should be shifting his focus towards emergent phenomena on the Internet rather than a single silicon mind in a box. He's stuck in a 20th century perspective.

wololo 15y ago

Andrew Ng's work is pretty neat: http://youtube.com/watch?v=ZmNOAtZIgIk http://youtube.com/watch?v=ZmNOAtZIgIk

FollowSteph3 15y ago

We also have to remember that the Turing test isn't a real measure of intelligence. After all a computer following rules is NOT any more intelligent than the rules themselves. For example, if someone gave me a ton of rules on how to convert sentences from English to another language, and the output was amazing, would that mean I'm intelligent? Not likely, just that I can follow the language conversion rules. I think the issue is that too much emphasis is being put on Turing tests as a measure of intelligence when in fact it's really more a measure of how well a computer can follow conversations and social norms. Just because you can fool a real person, doesn't mean you're intelligently interacting with that person. Just like if I can fool another person I can speak another language by following translation rules, it doesn't actually mean I can speak the other language at all!

unimpressive 15y ago
I assume your talking about the Chinese Room? (LINK: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room) I actually agree, but for different reasons. I don't think human judges (That is, NORMAL human judges, non-geeks.) are a good measure of an entities intelligence. I personally have managed to convince at least one person that I'm a machine. Sufficiently good pattern matching to produce reasonable-enough sounding sentences would probably fool most casual observers. For me, the validity to a turing test relies heavily on how long and under how much pressure the A.I has to keep up it's illusion of humanity. A more objective test of intelligence would be nice though.
- FollowSteph3 15y ago
  Yes, I meant the Chinese Room. I couldn't remember the exact term. Thank you for that! One test I heard of that sounded pretty promising is the ability of the computer to discover new patterns in existing data. Not just pattern matching, because that's possible without intelligence, but to discover new patterns from the existing data and use those new patterns to correctly predict the future. Now that's incredibly hard to do!!
  - codex 15y ago

montecarl 15y ago

Lets assume that humans are complex molecular machines. That is our bodies obey the laws of physics and are made of atoms that behave in predictable ways. If we know what we are made of (the molecules and how they are arranged) and how these molecules can be modeled (i.e. quantum mechanics) then it is only a matter of time until an entire human can be modeled on a computer. Once you can model the entire body, then you can have a computer that can pass the Turing test, because it more or less is human. If humans can be modeled as deterministic systems that follow physical laws, then computers will simulate them at some point in the future.

grannyg00se 15y ago
There are two problems that I can see here. First, the complexity in the physics/chemistry of our molecular machines is such that "only a matter of time" may extend longer than the time span of our species' existence. Second, it is completely possibly that we are more than molecular machines. There may be an aspect to our functioning that is beyond the physical. That aspect of our existence may not be possible to replicate.
- baddox 15y ago
  > There may be an aspect to our functioning that is beyond the physical. That aspect of our existence may not be possible to replicate. What does "beyond the physical" even mean? I assume you mean something "supernatural," meaning something that is "true/real," yet impossible to study or even verify empirically.
  - grannyg00se 15y ago
    Beyond the physical meaning properties that are unable to be replicated by manipulating physical atoms and molecules. I wouldn't call them "supernatural" at all because (assuming they do exist) they are absolutely a natural and even necessary part of life. I would assume they would be possible to verify in some way once we've reached the stage where hard AI is nearly achieved.

majmun 15y ago

I haven't yet seen bot that could answer question about specific setting that you are in when talking to it. for example if i ask bot to repeat what i ask it just before this. it can't tell. because bots like cleverbot operates by crowdsourcing answers and than parroting it randomly. Also when i ask it same question multiple times I get different answers. Maybe bots should store procedures in their database and not just crowdsourced answers. and keep context of current session. or something. They maybe passed the turing test But that just convinced me that Turing test really means nothing. You can't really determine anything for sure with turing test but only probability. (many humans acts or are stupid, if machine is stupid some may decide that machine is like human) What i would like to see more instead of machine passing turing test is building machine species that could survive in nature, if it can survive autonomously like some kind of animal than this machine species could be said to be intelligent.