30 ms·

Artificial Intelligence Could Be on Brink of Passing Turing Test

71 points by leejw00t354 15y ago

debacle 15y ago
TL;DR: Artificial Intelligence Probably Not on Brink of Passing Turing Test
- cpeterso 15y ago
  But Wired says it could be on brink of passing Turing Test! ;)
aashu_dwivedi 15y ago
Well I remember a post from a few months back saying artificial intelligence probably needs a reebot.
- leejw00t354 15y ago
  What exactly does it mean to reboot a field of study? Take a step back and try to find new, possibly easier approaches?
  - excuse-me 15y ago
    It's generally instigated as an alternative scenario to merely buzzword compliant ongoing forward dynamic enhancement using synergies between interdisciplinary field approaches. See - all you need is perl, rand and /usr/dict to create an AI that while it can't pass as human can at least obtain a research grant
invalidOrTaken 15y ago
I find it hilarious that half an hour after this is posted here, there are no comments. Because, you're right, O HN Reader: they're not even close. But you already knew that without reading TFA, didn't you? And just to satisfy your curiosity, they're talking about Watson-style machines, but then following this talk with quotes about "huge challenges " remaining, which are apparently too insignificant to mention in the title.
walexander 15y ago
The Turing Test was a very clever way of describing an AI without having to get into dead end philosophical arguments about what is or isn't intelligence (Ants have very complex social structure and engineering abilities - but are they intelligent?). Turing picked something uniquely human and used it as a baseline. Unfortunately, what we got is passing the cargo cult turing test, as described in the Chinese Room Experiment. I think what we all had hoped for, however, was HAL. What we are going to get is more and more iterations of cleverbot.
- debacle 15y ago
  The problem, of course, is that any heuristic based AI is going to be susceptible to some sort of Voigt-Kampf test which gives it away.
  - excuse-me 15y ago
    Unless you modify the behaviour of the human population to make it more unthinking, repetitive and predicable. Then it becomes impossible to spot the replicants! LOL, frist post, l33t ......
- code_scrapping 15y ago
  I agree. The point is that the Turing tests grades the machines capability to mimic, pretend. It's an impressive feat, but that's not what we're looking for. We are trying to get better ways of gathering new informations, handling unforeseen circumstances, and that's what we're getting in the Hollywood block-busters. Not chat-bots as walexander mentioned. On the other hand they said: "The first is the ready availability of vast amounts of raw data — from video feeds to complete sound environments, and from casual conversations to technical documents on every conceivable subject. The second is the advent of sophisticated techniques for collecting, organizing, and processing this rich collection of data." While first is true, the second is as generic as it gets. This is a nice overview of the current (comercial) advances, but the title is hyped.
- ErrantX 15y ago
  I think the problem has arisen from a misunderstanding of what Turing was getting at in his paper. At first he talks about Chess (an example chosen, as we know, because it has a well defined rule set) and a computer imitating a Chess player. He makes the point that, to a human player, it may be difficult to determine between a human player and a computer imitator. Even though the computer is not AI or otherwise "intelligent" it could be mistaken, under the constraints of the test, as human. Then he sets up the more complex test with the questioning (i.e. "convince me you are a man"). The point there is much the same; at some point it is possible to construct a machine that, within the constraints of the test, is functionally "human". He never claims it as an ultimate test for AI. IMO the greater point he suggests, which always seems to get glossed over, is this: that at some level of complexity a computer will be able to pass a test (as yet undefined) in which it imitates complete human intelligence to such a degree it appears to be full AI. That could all be rambling... but that is my understanding of his point. Over the interim the Turing Test has gotten mixed around and confused to such a degree that this insight is forgotten.
parsnips 15y ago
As soon as Deep Blue was mentioned as AI, I closed that browser tab. Another "journalist" trying to justify a paycheck.
tomelders 15y ago
One thing I've always wondered about turing tests: Wouldn't AI's need to lie a hell of a lot in order to pass it. For example, if I asked someone to tell me the capital city of every country in the world, I'd be very surprised if they could. However, a half decent AI could do this easily. But what if I pushed it further and started to ask really complex maths questions (something computers are much better at than humans) then It would become clear very quickly that I'm talking to a machine. Also, humans have holes in their knowledge. For example, given the question "Who is the prime minister of the Netherlands?" the answer for most people is going to be, "I don't know". Or what about "Which team won the first ever FA cup?". Despite not knowing the answer (The Royal Electrical & Mechanical Engineers) most people would hazard a guess (Manchester United, Liverpool) and be wrong. Programming an AI to play dumb would be relatively easy. But what use is an AI that lies? Passing the test may well be possible, but what use is Artificial intelligence that pretends to as dumb as humans?
- recursive 15y ago
  The AI might not need to play dumb. There's no reason I can think of that an AI must be good at math or embed encyclopedias. Asimov had a short story, whose name I can't remember, about an AI that believed it was human.
  - tikhonj 15y ago
    I think it isn't so much that an AI has a good reason for that but rather that there is no good reason to have an AI incapable of it. Of course, an alternate solution may be just around the corner--imagine talking to a person who has some sort of direct interface to Wlfram|Alpha (maybe Google glasses or something like that)--he would be able to answer those questions as easily as a computer, for the same reasons.
- jbattle 15y ago
  I'd never thought of this - but it's interesting that one of the foundational things we'd be teaching this AI is to lie to/deceive humans. Seems like a bad starting place. Of course, the turing test isn't REALLY some kind of gateway through which a strong AI is probable to develop, but still
leejw00t354 15y ago
Here is one of my favourite articles on the Turing Test. The method described in this article appears similar in its approach, "Suppose, for a moment, that all the words you have ever spoken, heard, written, or read, as well as all the visual scenes and all the sounds you have ever experienced, were recorded and accessible". https://sites.google.com/site/asenselessconversation/ https://sites.google.com/site/asenselessconversation/
nsomaru 15y ago
Such a load of speculation, psssht. Why is this on the front page?
cs702 15y ago
Despite its hyped-up title, this Wired news piece contains no real news of scientific advances. In fact, I can summarize it in one sentence: "with more and more data coming online, and with sophisticated techniques for collecting, organizing, and processing all this data, computers might soon be able to fool the Turing Test."
- ppod 15y ago
  What's the difference between collecting, organizing, and processing data, and intelligence?
  - zoul 15y ago
    The ability to solve problems that fall outside the envelope of your harvested and processed data?
    - ppod 15y ago
      Do you think that you have the ability to solve problems that fall outside the envelope of your harvested and processed data? I certainly don't think I have that ability, and I'm human (i swear).
drallison 15y ago
We are moving into a post-literate world. "Artificial Intelligence" is a field of endeavor, not an entity that can try to pass a test. The headline is not as bad as movie stars and news anchors using objective pronouns as the subject of a sentence, but it still shows that the language is changing, and not for the better, IMHO.
tambourine_man 15y ago
The contemporary approach: no new theoretical breakthrough? Pick an old model and throw more data at it.
jakeonthemove 15y ago
We already have a sort of AI that can be used for real world applications - it's called the Internet. Using Google, Facebook, Wikipedia and dozens of other sites, it's relatively easy to create a robot that can do quite a lot of things - the problem is that creating the actual physical body of the robot is expensive - humans are cheaper and still do everything better. We don't even need AI, we need robots for specific tasks that would also be programmed to work around any potential issues (most of which can be identified and programmed if the field of application is narrow enough) - making them create workarounds/solutions for new problems would be awesome and all, but it's not necessary, IMO.
stungeye 15y ago
Like some others have said, the Turing Test is more a human mimicry test than a test of intelligence or consciousness. We humans love to anthropomorphize, so tricking us into believing a machine is human shouldn't be how we gauge the effectiveness of our AI. I ran across these "Fundamental Principles of Cognition" that might do a better job: Principle 1. Object Identification (Categorization) Principle 2. Minimal Parsing ("Occam’s Razor") Principle 3. Object Prediction (Pattern Completion) Principle 4. Essence Distillation (Analogy Making) Principle 5. Quantity Estimation and Comparison (Numerosity Perception) Principle 6. Association-Building by Co-occurrence (Hebbian Learning) Principle 6½. Temporal Fading of Rarity (Learning by Forgetting) See: http://www.foundalis.com/res/poc/PrinciplesOfCognition.htm http://www.foundalis.com/res/poc/PrinciplesOfCognition.htm Also, Hofstadter suggests some similar "essential abilities for intelligence". 1. To respond to situations very flexibility. 2. To make sense out of ambiguous or contradictory messages. 3. To recognize the relative importance of different elements of a situation. 4. To find similarities between situations despite differences, which may separate them. 5. To draw distinctions between situations despite similarities, which may link them.
bandy 15y ago
Ah, another rehash the "AI springs forth from complexity" argument. This is entertainingly laid out in "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress", "Colossus: The Forbin Project", "The Adolescence of P1", "Man Plus", etc.
lectrick 15y ago
This article is wildly speculative. :/
nextparadigms 15y ago
A few months ago there was a rumor about a Google X AI project that passes the Turing Test 93% of the time in an IM conversation: http://www.webpronews.com/is-google-x-all-about-highly-intelligent-robots-2011-12 http://www.webpronews.com/is-google-x-all-about-highly-intel...
- tomerv 15y ago
  Wouldn't passing the Turing Test 93% of the time mean that the machine does a better job of pretending to be human than an actual human? I'd expect 50% success to be the target.
  - batista 15y ago
    I could just mean the result number is readjusted based on the baseline figure.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
iRobot 15y ago
One of these posts was from an AI. Can you tell which one?
drcube 15y ago
I think of the Turing test not as an actual experiment that can be performed, but more of a first crack at a working definition of intelligence. Sort of like Shannon said "Let's leave 'meaning' to the psychologists, and define 'information' based on properties inherent in the message itself" and ended up revolutionizing information theory. Turing is saying "Stop bickering over 'comprehension' and 'intent'. Can we just agree that if a machine can fool an intelligent human being into thinking it is also an intelligent human being - based only on its information output rather than its physical shape - that machine deserves the label 'intelligent'?" And I agree. Philosophers can argue about the internal state of that mind all they want. But if I can converse and crack jokes with my new computer buddy, I have no qualms about calling him intelligent. At least until he blue screens and finally fails the test by spitting out a hex dump.
bfrs 15y ago
If siri 5.0 or Cyc 1000000.0 passes the Turing test, it will be the same story all over again...the goal posts will be moved one more time. People will say that passing the Turing test is not really a mark of true intelligence, its just an imitation!

71 points by leejw00t354 15y ago

debacle 15y ago

TL;DR: Artificial Intelligence Probably Not on Brink of Passing Turing Test

cpeterso 15y ago
But Wired says it could be on brink of passing Turing Test! ;)

aashu_dwivedi 15y ago

Well I remember a post from a few months back saying artificial intelligence probably needs a reebot.

leejw00t354 15y ago
What exactly does it mean to reboot a field of study? Take a step back and try to find new, possibly easier approaches?
- excuse-me 15y ago
  It's generally instigated as an alternative scenario to merely buzzword compliant ongoing forward dynamic enhancement using synergies between interdisciplinary field approaches. See - all you need is perl, rand and /usr/dict to create an AI that while it can't pass as human can at least obtain a research grant

invalidOrTaken 15y ago

I find it hilarious that half an hour after this is posted here, there are no comments. Because, you're right, O HN Reader: they're not even close. But you already knew that without reading TFA, didn't you? And just to satisfy your curiosity, they're talking about Watson-style machines, but then following this talk with quotes about "huge challenges " remaining, which are apparently too insignificant to mention in the title.

walexander 15y ago

The Turing Test was a very clever way of describing an AI without having to get into dead end philosophical arguments about what is or isn't intelligence (Ants have very complex social structure and engineering abilities - but are they intelligent?). Turing picked something uniquely human and used it as a baseline. Unfortunately, what we got is passing the cargo cult turing test, as described in the Chinese Room Experiment. I think what we all had hoped for, however, was HAL. What we are going to get is more and more iterations of cleverbot.

debacle 15y ago
The problem, of course, is that any heuristic based AI is going to be susceptible to some sort of Voigt-Kampf test which gives it away.
- excuse-me 15y ago
  Unless you modify the behaviour of the human population to make it more unthinking, repetitive and predicable. Then it becomes impossible to spot the replicants! LOL, frist post, l33t ......
code_scrapping 15y ago
I agree. The point is that the Turing tests grades the machines capability to mimic, pretend. It's an impressive feat, but that's not what we're looking for. We are trying to get better ways of gathering new informations, handling unforeseen circumstances, and that's what we're getting in the Hollywood block-busters. Not chat-bots as walexander mentioned. On the other hand they said: "The first is the ready availability of vast amounts of raw data — from video feeds to complete sound environments, and from casual conversations to technical documents on every conceivable subject. The second is the advent of sophisticated techniques for collecting, organizing, and processing this rich collection of data." While first is true, the second is as generic as it gets. This is a nice overview of the current (comercial) advances, but the title is hyped.
ErrantX 15y ago
I think the problem has arisen from a misunderstanding of what Turing was getting at in his paper. At first he talks about Chess (an example chosen, as we know, because it has a well defined rule set) and a computer imitating a Chess player. He makes the point that, to a human player, it may be difficult to determine between a human player and a computer imitator. Even though the computer is not AI or otherwise "intelligent" it could be mistaken, under the constraints of the test, as human. Then he sets up the more complex test with the questioning (i.e. "convince me you are a man"). The point there is much the same; at some point it is possible to construct a machine that, within the constraints of the test, is functionally "human". He never claims it as an ultimate test for AI. IMO the greater point he suggests, which always seems to get glossed over, is this: that at some level of complexity a computer will be able to pass a test (as yet undefined) in which it imitates complete human intelligence to such a degree it appears to be full AI. That could all be rambling... but that is my understanding of his point. Over the interim the Turing Test has gotten mixed around and confused to such a degree that this insight is forgotten.

parsnips 15y ago

As soon as Deep Blue was mentioned as AI, I closed that browser tab. Another "journalist" trying to justify a paycheck.

tomelders 15y ago

One thing I've always wondered about turing tests: Wouldn't AI's need to lie a hell of a lot in order to pass it. For example, if I asked someone to tell me the capital city of every country in the world, I'd be very surprised if they could. However, a half decent AI could do this easily. But what if I pushed it further and started to ask really complex maths questions (something computers are much better at than humans) then It would become clear very quickly that I'm talking to a machine. Also, humans have holes in their knowledge. For example, given the question "Who is the prime minister of the Netherlands?" the answer for most people is going to be, "I don't know". Or what about "Which team won the first ever FA cup?". Despite not knowing the answer (The Royal Electrical & Mechanical Engineers) most people would hazard a guess (Manchester United, Liverpool) and be wrong. Programming an AI to play dumb would be relatively easy. But what use is an AI that lies? Passing the test may well be possible, but what use is Artificial intelligence that pretends to as dumb as humans?

recursive 15y ago
The AI might not need to play dumb. There's no reason I can think of that an AI must be good at math or embed encyclopedias. Asimov had a short story, whose name I can't remember, about an AI that believed it was human.
- tikhonj 15y ago
  I think it isn't so much that an AI has a good reason for that but rather that there is no good reason to have an AI incapable of it. Of course, an alternate solution may be just around the corner--imagine talking to a person who has some sort of direct interface to Wlfram|Alpha (maybe Google glasses or something like that)--he would be able to answer those questions as easily as a computer, for the same reasons.
jbattle 15y ago
I'd never thought of this - but it's interesting that one of the foundational things we'd be teaching this AI is to lie to/deceive humans. Seems like a bad starting place. Of course, the turing test isn't REALLY some kind of gateway through which a strong AI is probable to develop, but still

leejw00t354 15y ago

Here is one of my favourite articles on the Turing Test. The method described in this article appears similar in its approach, "Suppose, for a moment, that all the words you have ever spoken, heard, written, or read, as well as all the visual scenes and all the sounds you have ever experienced, were recorded and accessible". https://sites.google.com/site/asenselessconversation/ https://sites.google.com/site/asenselessconversation/

nsomaru 15y ago

Such a load of speculation, psssht. Why is this on the front page?

cs702 15y ago

Despite its hyped-up title, this Wired news piece contains no real news of scientific advances. In fact, I can summarize it in one sentence: "with more and more data coming online, and with sophisticated techniques for collecting, organizing, and processing all this data, computers might soon be able to fool the Turing Test."

ppod 15y ago
What's the difference between collecting, organizing, and processing data, and intelligence?
- zoul 15y ago
  The ability to solve problems that fall outside the envelope of your harvested and processed data?
  - ppod 15y ago
    Do you think that you have the ability to solve problems that fall outside the envelope of your harvested and processed data? I certainly don't think I have that ability, and I'm human (i swear).

drallison 15y ago

We are moving into a post-literate world. "Artificial Intelligence" is a field of endeavor, not an entity that can try to pass a test. The headline is not as bad as movie stars and news anchors using objective pronouns as the subject of a sentence, but it still shows that the language is changing, and not for the better, IMHO.

tambourine_man 15y ago

The contemporary approach: no new theoretical breakthrough? Pick an old model and throw more data at it.

jakeonthemove 15y ago

We already have a sort of AI that can be used for real world applications - it's called the Internet. Using Google, Facebook, Wikipedia and dozens of other sites, it's relatively easy to create a robot that can do quite a lot of things - the problem is that creating the actual physical body of the robot is expensive - humans are cheaper and still do everything better. We don't even need AI, we need robots for specific tasks that would also be programmed to work around any potential issues (most of which can be identified and programmed if the field of application is narrow enough) - making them create workarounds/solutions for new problems would be awesome and all, but it's not necessary, IMO.

stungeye 15y ago

Like some others have said, the Turing Test is more a human mimicry test than a test of intelligence or consciousness. We humans love to anthropomorphize, so tricking us into believing a machine is human shouldn't be how we gauge the effectiveness of our AI. I ran across these "Fundamental Principles of Cognition" that might do a better job: Principle 1. Object Identification (Categorization) Principle 2. Minimal Parsing ("Occam’s Razor") Principle 3. Object Prediction (Pattern Completion) Principle 4. Essence Distillation (Analogy Making) Principle 5. Quantity Estimation and Comparison (Numerosity Perception) Principle 6. Association-Building by Co-occurrence (Hebbian Learning) Principle 6½. Temporal Fading of Rarity (Learning by Forgetting) See: http://www.foundalis.com/res/poc/PrinciplesOfCognition.htm http://www.foundalis.com/res/poc/PrinciplesOfCognition.htm Also, Hofstadter suggests some similar "essential abilities for intelligence". 1. To respond to situations very flexibility. 2. To make sense out of ambiguous or contradictory messages. 3. To recognize the relative importance of different elements of a situation. 4. To find similarities between situations despite differences, which may separate them. 5. To draw distinctions between situations despite similarities, which may link them.

bandy 15y ago

Ah, another rehash the "AI springs forth from complexity" argument. This is entertainingly laid out in "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress", "Colossus: The Forbin Project", "The Adolescence of P1", "Man Plus", etc.

lectrick 15y ago

This article is wildly speculative. :/

nextparadigms 15y ago

A few months ago there was a rumor about a Google X AI project that passes the Turing Test 93% of the time in an IM conversation: http://www.webpronews.com/is-google-x-all-about-highly-intelligent-robots-2011-12 http://www.webpronews.com/is-google-x-all-about-highly-intel...

tomerv 15y ago
Wouldn't passing the Turing Test 93% of the time mean that the machine does a better job of pretending to be human than an actual human? I'd expect 50% success to be the target.
- batista 15y ago
  I could just mean the result number is readjusted based on the baseline figure.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

iRobot 15y ago

One of these posts was from an AI. Can you tell which one?

drcube 15y ago

I think of the Turing test not as an actual experiment that can be performed, but more of a first crack at a working definition of intelligence. Sort of like Shannon said "Let's leave 'meaning' to the psychologists, and define 'information' based on properties inherent in the message itself" and ended up revolutionizing information theory. Turing is saying "Stop bickering over 'comprehension' and 'intent'. Can we just agree that if a machine can fool an intelligent human being into thinking it is also an intelligent human being - based only on its information output rather than its physical shape - that machine deserves the label 'intelligent'?" And I agree. Philosophers can argue about the internal state of that mind all they want. But if I can converse and crack jokes with my new computer buddy, I have no qualms about calling him intelligent. At least until he blue screens and finally fails the test by spitting out a hex dump.

bfrs 15y ago

If siri 5.0 or Cyc 1000000.0 passes the Turing test, it will be the same story all over again...the goal posts will be moved one more time. People will say that passing the Turing test is not really a mark of true intelligence, its just an imitation!