Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
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From: yking@cs.ubc.ca (Yossarian Yggy King)
Subject: Re: Turing Test: opinions on an idea
Message-ID: <1991May15.055331.10631@cs.ubc.ca>
Sender: usenet@cs.ubc.ca (Usenet News)
Organization: University of British Columbia, Vancouver, B.C., Canada
References: <1991May13.133711.102@athena.mit.edu> <2200@seti.inria.fr> <1991May15.003627.23521@mp.cs.niu.edu>
Date: Wed, 15 May 91 05:53:31 GMT

The proposed idea of throwing vast amounts of memory at the intelligence
problem and using table lookup sounds to me virtually identical to the
Chinese room argument against strong AI (which I don't buy, but that's
a whole other can of worms that hopefully needn't be reopened :-).

WRT the Turing test, it seems like a very naive way to assess intelligence.
To draw an analogy with software engineering, the TT is equivalent to
running a program for a while, trying a whole bunch of different inputs,
and hoping that you manage to detect all the bugs. While a lot of software
testing is done in this manner, there are more thorough, principled methods
of software verification (ensure all modules are tested, take all paths, etc,
and various types of "theoretical" approaches such as Floyd's method of
inductive assertions for verifying partial and total correctness [work done
at Stanford; sorry, no reference]).

I realize that until we can nail down better what intelligence is, this will
be very difficult, but shouldn't there be more principled and thorough ways
of evaluating intelligence than the TT? (perhaps producing an intelligence
rating on some scale, rather than the simple yes/no results of the TT)

Just MHO's
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