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From: smoliar@vaxa.isi.edu (Stephen Smoliar)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: PARRY, THE DOCTOR, and the Turing Test
Message-ID: <14284@venera.isi.edu>
Date: 14 Jul 90 00:48:24 GMT
References: <3004@tellab5.tellabs.com>
Sender: news@venera.isi.edu
Reply-To: smoliar@vaxa.isi.edu (Stephen Smoliar)
Organization: USC-Information Sciences Institute
Lines: 51

In article <3004@tellab5.tellabs.com> rapp@sunGk.tellabs.com (Chuck Rapp)
writes:
>
>Secondly, I don't believe THE DOCTOR or ELIZA were ever put before a
>formal Turing Test and if they were, the interregator would probably
>become frustrated with these programs quickly.  There is a anecdote
>that ELIZA was left running on a terminal one weekend by a system
>administrator.  It happened that a not-too-technical VP brought in a
>potential customer to view the company's software product.  The VP
>came upon the terminal which had ELIZA and, thinking it was
>connected to the system administrator, started to "talk".  The
>conversation went something like this:
>
>	VP:    Please start up the demo.
>	ELIZA: Why do you want me to start up the demo?
>	VP:    Because I want to show it to a customer.
>	ELIZA: Is it important for you to show it to a customer?
>	VP:    Yes!
>	ELIZA: Are you saying yes just to agree?
>	VP:    I am trying to make a sale.
>	ELIZA: Tell me more about this need.
>	VP:    <expletive deleted>
>
>The system administrator was in a fog when the VP chewed him out 
>the next Monday.
>
This is not quite what happened, but it is close enough that the circumstances
should be left altered to protect the parties involved!  Nevertheless, one must
still recognize all those individual who chose to behave as if ELIZA really
WERE an intelligence (or at least understanding) individual.  This is one of
the circumstances which prompted Weizenbaum to go over the brink with his book.
He could not understand that a secretary might want to be left alone while
talking to ELIZA!  (Of course, she would be just as likely to want to be left
alone while talking to her cat . . . as would any of us.)  I happened to show
ELIZA to a member of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company;  and her assessment
was that it was "just like talking to Merce."  The point is that you can do
all sorts of things when you exchange sentences, and some of those things which
involve "intelligence" need not also involve any rigorous semantic analysis of
those sentences.  Perhaps the best evidence for this was the "withdrawal" which
set in among many programmers when the ELIZA code went away at one point.

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