2 ms·

"Man pretending to be woman vs real woman" was just an example used to introduce the question in the form of a party game between humans before moving onto the

by Ukv 2y ago

"Man pretending to be woman vs real woman" was just an example used to introduce the question in the form of a party game between humans before moving onto the actual question of a machine pretending to be human vs a real human. At a stretch, by looking at only your quoted snippet you could read that the machine is pretending to be a woman - but that interpretation is not consistent with the rest of the paper. For instance, "the best strategy [for the machine] is to try to provide answers that would naturally be given by a man".

d0mine 2y ago
It is consistent: "A" is a man that pretends to be a woman (B). Machine plays "A" role. Ideal machine would be indistinguishable from a man imitating a woman (it must not be too good or too bad at it compared to a man)
- Ukv 2y ago
  If the goal is to see "whether machine can pretend to be a woman better than a man can" as you previously stated, surely the machine's goal would be to imitate a woman as well as it can? Making it "not be too good" would run contrary to the aim of determining whether machines can pretend to be a woman better than a man can. My understanding is that you're now instead saying the goal is to see how well a machine can imitate a human male imitating a woman. This still seems inconsistent with the rest of the paper, like Turing's mention of "the part of B being taken by a man", that the example interrogator questions appear to discern intelligence opposed to gender in the machine vs human game, or that a hypothetical flipped test would involve a man imitating a machine and failing due to slowness in arithmetic. I believe both of your proposed interpretations miss the central idea of Turing's proposal and alter it in a way that would make significance of the test/results questionable. Specifically, it's intended to be a sufficiently general arena to introduce any relevant task/test to determine intelligence (like feeding in chess positions, as in Turing's example question) - not just one oddly specific task. While it's likely possible to make ad-hoc changes until it's consistent, the standard reading (machine imitating human) seems infinitely more plausible to me. There's plenty in the paper justifying the significance of determining whether a machine can answer questions indistinguishably from a human, yet no reasoning at all for why it would be narrowed to the very specific case of having the machine imitate one gender imitating the other gender.
  - d0mine 2y ago
    Technically, you have a point. But it is unlikely that "too good" variant in Turing time was interesting.

by Ukv 2y ago

d0mine 2y ago

It is consistent: "A" is a man that pretends to be a woman (B). Machine plays "A" role. Ideal machine would be indistinguishable from a man imitating a woman (it must not be too good or too bad at it compared to a man)

Ukv 2y ago
If the goal is to see "whether machine can pretend to be a woman better than a man can" as you previously stated, surely the machine's goal would be to imitate a woman as well as it can? Making it "not be too good" would run contrary to the aim of determining whether machines can pretend to be a woman better than a man can. My understanding is that you're now instead saying the goal is to see how well a machine can imitate a human male imitating a woman. This still seems inconsistent with the rest of the paper, like Turing's mention of "the part of B being taken by a man", that the example interrogator questions appear to discern intelligence opposed to gender in the machine vs human game, or that a hypothetical flipped test would involve a man imitating a machine and failing due to slowness in arithmetic. I believe both of your proposed interpretations miss the central idea of Turing's proposal and alter it in a way that would make significance of the test/results questionable. Specifically, it's intended to be a sufficiently general arena to introduce any relevant task/test to determine intelligence (like feeding in chess positions, as in Turing's example question) - not just one oddly specific task. While it's likely possible to make ad-hoc changes until it's consistent, the standard reading (machine imitating human) seems infinitely more plausible to me. There's plenty in the paper justifying the significance of determining whether a machine can answer questions indistinguishably from a human, yet no reasoning at all for why it would be narrowed to the very specific case of having the machine imitate one gender imitating the other gender.
- d0mine 2y ago
  Technically, you have a point. But it is unlikely that "too good" variant in Turing time was interesting.