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From: ISSSSM@NUSVM.BITNET (Stephen Smoliar)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: RE: IF IT DOES NOT PASS TT IT IS NOT INTELLIGENT????
Message-ID: <9106230258.AA12009@lilac.berkeley.edu>
Date: 23 Jun 91 02:58:22 GMT
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X-Unparsable-Date: Sun, 23 Jun 91 10:57:26 SST

In article <1657@ucl-cs.uucp> G.Joly@cs.ucl.ac.uk (Gordon Joly) writes:
>Stephen Smoliar writes, on the subject of Turing's orignal paper,
> > Unless I am mistaken,
> > Turing uses his opening paragraphs to argue that it is a waste of time
> > to consider a question as naive as "Can a machine think?"
>
>Perhaps some should tell John Searle. One of his lectures in "Minds,
>brains and science : the 1984 Reith lectures" is just that: "Can a
>machine think?"
>
I had two targets in mind when I decided to end this last article by pointing
my flame-thrower at those who had not yet bothered to give Turing's article a
serious reading:

 1.  Supposedly reputable scholars (such as John Searle) who
 should know better but are too busy enhancing their reputations
 by further elaborating upon arguments whose foundations sit on
 this fundamental misunderstanding of the original text.

 2.  Students and "curious observers" who seem more inclined to
 soak up second-hand accounts from folks like Searle than to set
 aside the couple of hours it takes to read what Turing REALLY
 had to say.

(Michael Thomas seems to be our resident representative of the second category.
Even when Minsky spells it all out with a Magic Marker, he still does not get
the message.  It IS a waste of time to argue about silly words like "think" and
"intelligence" when you could be spending your time building machines that
exhibit interesting behavior, such as the "vehicles" of Braitenberg's fantasy
or the robots of Brooks' reality.)

> > Therefore,
> > in the interest of being more productive, he introduces his "Imitation
> > Game" as a more realistic arena for investigation.  In other words he
> > replaces the intelligence question with that of whether or not a machine
> > could play the Imitation Game well enough that the other player would not
> > recognize it as a machine.  He then devotes the rest of the paper to
> > arguing
> > why it is feasible that this would eventually be the case.
>
>I think I am missing something. If it a box could "walk, talk and chew
>gum", how different would it appear if it could only "imitate" said
>behaviour?
>
Shame on you, Gordon!  You ARE missing something!  You have just revealed that
YOU have not read Turing either!  Turing's Imitation Game is well-defined in an
(intentionally) relatively narrow context.  That context does NOT involve
walking, talking, or chewing gum.  It involves nothing more than exchanges
of text through the objective medium of the logical equivalent of a dumb
terminal.  This narrow context is very important to Turing's argument for
exactly the reason I stated above:  The task is simple enough that you can
decide whether or not you have succeeded without getting into the deep waters
of philosophy.

At least you are in good company, Gordon.  This is where Searle tripped up,
too.  After all, the Chinese Room is nothing more than the Imitation Game with
some new sets and costumes.  (Think of it as the Peter Hall version if you are
at all into theater.)  Searle's big mistake, however, is that he wants to
accuse Turing and later members of the artificial intelligence community
of assuming that "winning" the Imitation Game is equivalent exhibiting thought.
Now there are certainly those out there who would like to make hay out of this
alleged equivalence, particularly if it is what the funding agencies want to
hear;  and they probably DO deserve at least a slap on the wrists if they try
to claim they are doing this in Turing's name.  However, such a slap has far
more impact when in comes from Marvin Minsky than when it comes from John
Searle, simply because Minsky's understanding of both the letter and the
spirit of Turing surpasses Searle's on every count.

===============================================================================

Stephen W. Smoliar
Institute of Systems Science
National University of Singapore
Heng Mui Keng Terrace, Kent Ridge
SINGAPORE 0511

BITNET:  ISSSSM@NUSVM

"He was of Lord Essex's opinion, 'rather to go an hundred miles to speak with
one wise man, than five miles to see a fair town.'"--Boswell on Johnson