Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!usc!ucsd!ogicse!milton!forbis
From: forbis@milton.u.washington.edu (Gary Forbis)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: Value of turing test?
Message-ID: <6681@milton.u.washington.edu>
Date: 24 Aug 90 07:39:33 GMT
References: <14942@csli.Stanford.EDU> <1353@thor.wright.EDU>
Distribution: comp
Organization: University of Washington, Seattle
Lines: 34

In article <1353@thor.wright.EDU> vdasigi@thor.wright.edu writes:
>While one might interpret the Turing test as a test/definition of
>intelligence, it seems to me to be actually a test of the "humanness"
>of the subject (and in this sense, all normal people should be able to
>pass the test), and I believe most of the current discussion supports
>this view.

From _Metamagical_Themas_ by D. Hofstadter:

in the chapter titled "A Coffeehouse Conversation on the Turing Test"
Post Scriptum.

        The first trip was so successful that I decided to do it again
     a couple of months later.  This time they threw an informal party
     at an apartment a few of them shared.  Zamir had forwarned me that
     they were hoping to give me a demonstration of something that had
     already been done in a recent class meeting.  It seems that the 
     question of whether computers could ever think had arisen, and most
     of the group members had taken a negative stand on the issue.

The pages following this covered a transcript between a confederate playing
the part of a computer program and Douglas Hofstadter.  The conclusion is
startling.  "Zamir summarizes this dramatic demonstration [the one in the
class] by saying that his class was willing to view _anything_on_a_video_
terminal_ as mechanically produced, no matter how sophisticated, insightful,
or poetic an utterance it might be.  They might find it interesting and
even surprising, but they would find some way to discount those qualities."

I suspect that this 1983 experiment could be repeated today with similar
results.  Given a predisposition to discount computer interactions there
may be no way to convince some of the identity between how humans think
and how computers think even after such an identity has been established.

--gary forbis@milton.u.washington.edu