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From: mcdermott-drew@cs.yale.edu (Drew McDermott)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Turing Test: opinions on an idea
Message-ID: <1991May21.155325.17797@cs.yale.edu>
Date: 21 May 91 15:53:25 GMT
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   In article <YcC8CRG00WBM83X4Fq@andrew.cmu.edu> hm02+@andrew.cmu.edu (Hans P. Moravec) writes:
   >CC:
   >
   >mcdermott-drew@cs.yale.edu (Drew McDermott) writes:
   >
   >> 2. Many conversational remarks have no context-independent responses, e.g.:
   >>  "What time is it?"  (due to Pat Hayes)
   >>  "Did you hear that? It sounded like a sonic boom."
   >>  "I don't know about you, but those heart tremors made me quayle in
   >>   fear."
   >> 
   >> There's no way to encode a single appropriate response to
   >> conversations including sentences like these.  There's also no way to
   >> rule them out that I can think of.  (Any attempt to do so would make
   >> it too easy for the human to always win, by subtly breaking the
   >> rules.)
   >
   >   This is not a good objection to the conversation tree idea.
   >The machine simply preambles its conversation: "It sure is quiet down
   >here in this inpenetrable bunker.  I'd go bonkers if I didn't have this
   >teletype, which is my only link to the outside world.  Thanks for taking
   >the time to schmooze with me.  We intelligent thinkers should support
   >one another." 

But how do we embed this idea in the context of the Turing Test?  Are
we testing to see if the machine can mimic a person imprisoned in a
bunker (for his entire life)?  If so, where do we get such a person
for the machine to compete with?  

Perhaps the idea is that we tell the human contestant: "You will be
disqualified as soon as you allude to anything outside the realm of
the conversation itself," but this seems hopelessly unenforceable.
Even the machine is bound to have encoded some reference to the
outside world in its "game tree."  (E.g., does a reference to chess
count as a reference to the outside world?  Presumably it's a merely
historical fact that there is such a game, whose rules have been
formalized in a certain way as of the late twentieth century.)

The Turing Test makes no sense unless the tester thinks he is talking
to two entities that just walked in off the street, and know something
about what's going on around them.

                                             -- Drew