Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!wuarchive!emory!gatech!mcnc!ncsuvx!news From: fostel@eos.ncsu.edu (Gary Fostel) Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy Subject: Re: Searle's Chinese Room Keywords: Strong AI, Turing test Message-ID: <1990Nov27.231501.1621@ncsuvx.ncsu.edu> Date: 27 Nov 90 23:15:01 GMT References: <16197@mentor.cc.purdue.edu> <3952@media-lab.MEDIA.MIT.EDU> <10297@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV> <1990Nov16.171041.14144@ncsuvx.ncsu.edu> <1990Nov19.192555.29337@cs.umn.edu> <1990Nov21.181445.11552@n Sender: news@ncsuvx.ncsu.edu (USENET News System) Reply-To: fostel@eos.ncsu.edu (Gary Fostel) Organization: North Carolina State University Lines: 39 Is the Turing Test well defined? Thornley, in answer to some of my objections to serious use of the Turing test was that the person applying the test needed to: Use a little common sense. This is delightful. Is "common sense" related to intelligence? Well, if so than the key to Thornley's defence of the Turing test might be that the tester needs to be intelligent. How intelligent? I'm reminded of the old saw: Common sense is neither common nor sensible. My criticism of the Turing test is directed at it's use as an operational definition of intelligence. It ends up being circular since it can not be used without slecting a judge to make the decision and the judge must be intelligent themselves. A valid SCIENTIFIC test can not rely on the judegement of the experimenter. That is the point of constructing objective measures and experimental technique that can be repeated by another researcher. If they do what you do and they do not get the same result, there is something wrong with the experiment. I have no trouble imagining that different people will decide differently about an agent undergoing the Turing test, so the experiment is not valid. Of course, one answer is to disclaim any intent to be scientific about it and go back to argueing about what it all means in a subjective sense. It is pointless to seriously think about constructing a test for the presense of a thing that may not be a well defined thing at all. My own view of what intelligence is, will be different from yours and that pretty much scotches any serious scientific work until someone comes up with a more testible property than "intelligence". There is probably some way to convert the Turing test into a useable measurement instrument, but I hope anyone doing that would not claim they were measuring or detecting "intelligence". ----GaryFostel---- Department of Computer Science North Carolina State University