Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.2 9/18/84; site utai.UUCP Path: utzoo!utcsri!utai!me From: me@utai.UUCP (Daniel Simon) Newsgroups: net.ai,net.cog-eng Subject: Re: Searle, Turing, Symbols, Categories (Question not comment) Message-ID: <2495@utai.UUCP> Date: Mon, 6-Oct-86 14:15:42 EDT Article-I.D.: utai.2495 Posted: Mon Oct 6 14:15:42 1986 Date-Received: Fri, 10-Oct-86 02:51:23 EDT References: <158@mind.UUCP> <150@cwrudg.UUCP> <160@mind.UUCP> Reply-To: me@utai.UUCP (Daniel Simon) Organization: CSRI, University of Toronto Lines: 69 Summary: In article <160@mind.UUCP> harnad@mind.UUCP (Stevan Harnad) writes: > >In reply to (1): The linguistic version of the turing test (turing's >original version) is restricted to linguistic interactions: >Language-in/Language-out. The robotic version requires the candidate >system to operate on objects in the world. In both cases the (turing) >criterion is whether the system can PERFORM indistinguishably from a human >being. (The original version was proposed largely so that your >judgment would not be prejudiced by the system's nonhuman appearance.) > I have no idea if this is a relevant issue or a relevant place to bring it up, but this whole business of the Turing test makes me profoundly suspicious. For example, we all know about Weizenbaum's ELIZA, which, he claimed, convinced many clever, relatively computer-literate (for their day) people that it was intelligent. This fact leads me to some questions which, in my view, ought to be seriously addressed before the phrase "Turing test" is bandied about (and probably already have been addressed, but I didn't notice, and will thank everybody in advance for telling me where to find a treatment of them and asking me to kindly buzz off): 1) To what extent is our discernment of intelligent behaviour context- dependent? ELIZA was able to appear intelligent because of the clever choice of context (in a Rogerian therapy session, the kind of dull, repetitive comments made by ELIZA seem perfectly appropriate, and hence, intelligent). Mr. Harnad has brought up the problem of physical appearance as a prejudicing factor in the assessment of "human" qualities like intelligence. Might not the robot version lead to the opposite problem of testers being insufficiently skeptical of a machine with human appearance (or even of a machine so unlike a human being in appearance that mildly human-like behaviour takes on an exaggerated significance in the tester's mind)? Is it ever possible to trust the results of any instance of the test as being a true indicator of the properties of the tested entity itself, rather than those of the environment in which it was tested? 2) Assuming that some "neutral" context can be found which would not "distort" the results of the test (and I'm not at all convinced that such a context exists, or even that the idea of such a context has any meaning), what would be so magic about the level of perceptiveness of the shrewdest, most perspicacious tester available, that would make his inability to distinguish man from machine in some instance the official criterion by which to judge intelligence? In short, what does passing (or failing) the Turing test really mean? 3) If the Turing test is in fact an unacceptable standard, and building a machine that can pass it an inappropriate goal (and, as questions 1 and 2 have probably already suggested, this is what I strongly suspect), are there more appropriate means by which we could evaluate the human-like or intelligent properties of an AI system? In effect, is it possible to formulate the qualities that constitute intelligence in a manner which is more intuitively satisfying than the standard AI stuff about reasoning, but still more rigorous than the Turing test? As I said, I don't know if my questions are legitimate, or if they have already been satisfactorily resolved, or if they belong elsewhere; I merely bring them up here because this is the first place I have seen the Turing test brought up in a long time. I am eager to see what others have to say on the subject. >Stevan Harnad >princeton!mind!harnad Daniel R. Simon "Look at them yo-yo's, that's the way to do it Ya go to grad school, get your PhD"