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From: cam@edai.ed.ac.uk (Chris Malcolm    cam@uk.ac.ed.edai   031 667 1011 x2550)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: Congratulations! You passed the Turing test.
Message-ID: <423@edai.ed.ac.uk>
Date: 15 Jun 89 01:02:57 GMT
References: <8906120617.AA28747@wisdocs.wisdom.weizmann.ac.il> <1399@lzfme.att.com>
Reply-To: cam@edai (Chris Malcolm)
Organization: University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh
Lines: 40

In article <1399@lzfme.att.com> jwi@lzfme.att.com (Jim Winer @ AT&T, Middletown, NJ) writes:

>It is clear, based on the postings to this newsgroup, that to pass the
>Turing test and be indistinguishable from a human, a machine must be
>at the minimum, sarcastic and inane on occasion. A machine which
>does not exhibit emotional response or a sense of humor might be
>considered anti-intelligent, but certainly not human. Let us not
>become so serious about the bullshit we wade through that we cannot
>laugh at ourselves. Flaming is a strictly human activity.

Don't underestimate Turing! He made it clear that the machine would have
to mimic human imperfections, such as making arithmetic mistakes,
although, as a proper gentleman, he refrained from clarifying the
possible interpretation of his paper that he considered mistakes in
arithmetic to be specially characteristic of women :-)

On a more serious note, Harnad has suggested that the linguistic
competence required by the Turing Test will in practice be unachievable
by an implementation short of a robot, i.e., a creature in a world, as
opposed to a brain (or computer) in a bottle attached to a terminal. In
that case, Koestler's analysis of humour suggests that you might not be
able to build an intelligent robot without _necessarily_ equipping it with
a sense of humour. In other words, if you want to build a machine to
pass the Turing Test, it may be quite unnecessary to _simulate_ humour,
etc., these things may turn out to be an essential part of the
architecture, much in the same way as any decently powerful vision
system will be prone to optical illusions.

It's a question of how many ways there are of being intelligent (those
who think intelligence is a silly concept please supply an alternative
word here); maybe there's only one (I'm serious - what is the
alternative to "intelligent" here?). How many ways are there of doing
arithmetic?  Forgetting such trivial transformations as base systems, it
is a presumption of the SETI program that there is only one way - the
universal language of number and logic which all industrial-quality
extraterrestials (and presumably robots) _must_ understand.
-- 
Chris Malcolm    cam@uk.ac.ed.edai   031 667 1011 x2550
Department of Artificial Intelligence, Edinburgh University
5 Forrest Hill, Edinburgh, EH1 2QL, UK