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From: harnad@mind.UUCP (Stevan Harnad)
Newsgroups: net.ai,net.cog-eng
Subject: Re: Searle, Turing, Symbols, Categories
Message-ID: <1@mind.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 16-Oct-86 02:17:51 EDT
Article-I.D.: mind.1
Posted: Thu Oct 16 02:17:51 1986
Date-Received: Thu, 16-Oct-86 06:10:41 EDT
References: <158@mind.UUCP> <150@cwrudg.UUCP> <160@mind.UUCP> <2495@utai.UUCP> <2552@utai.UUCP>
Organization: Cognitive Science, Princeton University
Lines: 93
Summary: On ROBOTIC TURING TESTING: FORMAL and INFORMAL, BLIND and NONBLIND
Xref: mnetor net.ai:1190 net.cog-eng:285

In reply to a prior iteration D. Simon writes:

>	I fail to see what [your "Total Turing Test"] has to do with
>	the Turing test as originally conceived, which involved measuring
>	up AI systems against observers' impressions, rather than against
>	objective standards... Moreover, you haven't said anything concrete
>	about what this test might look like.

How about this for a first approximation: We already know, roughly
speaking, what human beings are able to "do" -- their total cognitive
performance capacity: They can recognize, manipulate, sort, identify and
describe the objects in their environment and they can respond and reply
appropriately to descriptions. Get a robot to do that. When you think
he can do everything you know people can do formally, see whether
people can tell him apart from people informally.

>	I believe that people in general dodge the "other minds" problem
>	simply by accepting as a convention that human beings are by 
>	definition intelligent.

That's an artful dodge indeed. And do you think animals also accept such
conventions about one another? Philosophers, at least, seem to
have noticed that there's a bit of a problem there. Looking human
certainly gives us the prima facie benefit of the doubt in many cases,
but so far nature has spared us having to contend with any really
artful imposters. Wait till the robots begin giving our lax informal
turing-testing a run for its money.

>	What you seem to be saying is that [what you call] 
>	the informal component [(i) of the turing test -- 
>	i. e., indistinguishability from a person, as judged by a
>	person] has no validity at all apart from the "context" of
>	having passed [your] component (i) [i.e., the generation of
>	our total cognitive performance capacity]. The obvious
>	conclusion is that component (ii) is superfluous.

It's no more superfluous than, say, the equivalent component in the
design of an artificial music composer. First you get it to perform in
accordance with what you believe to be the formal rules of (diatonic)
composition. Then, when it successfully performs according to the
rules, see whether people like its stuff. Peoples' judgments, after
all, were not only the source of those rules in the first place, but
without the informal aesthetic sense that guided them, the rules would
amount to just that -- meaningless acoustic syntax.

Perhaps another way of putting it is that I doubt that what guides our
informal judgments (and underlies our capacities) can be completely
formalized in advance. The road to Total-Turing Utopia will probably
be a long series of feedback cycles between the formal and informal
components of the test before we ever achieve our final passing grade.

>	One question you haven't addressed is the relationship between
>	intelligence and "human performance". Are the two synonymous?
>	If so, why bother to make artificial humans... And if not, how
>	does your "total Turing test" relate to the discernment of
>	intelligence, as opposed to human-like behaviour?

Intelligence is what generates human performance. We make artificial
humans to implement and test our theories about the substrate of human
performance capacity. And there's no objective difference between
human and (turing-indistinguishably) human-like.

>	WHAT DOES THE "TOTAL TURING TEST" LOOK LIKE?...  Please
>	forgive my impertinent questions, but I haven't read your
>	articles, and I'm not exactly clear about what this "total"
>	Turing test entails.

Try reading the articles.

			******

I will close with an afterthought on "blind" vs. "nonblind" turing
testing that I had after the last iteration:

In the informal component of the total turing test it may be
arguable that a sceptic would give a robot a better run for its money
if he were pre-alerted to the possibility that it was a robot (i.e., if the
test were conducted "nonblind" rather than "blind"). That way the robot
wouldn't be inheriting so much of the a priori benefit of the doubt that
had accrued from our lifetime of successful turing-testing of biological
persons of similar appearance (in our everyday informal solutions to
the "other-minds" problem). The blind/nonblind issue does not seem critical
though, since obviously the turing test is an open-ended one (and
probably also, like all other empirical conjectures, confirmable only
as a matter of degree); so we probably wouldn't want to make up our minds
too hastily in any case. I would say that several years of having lived
amongst us, as in the sci-fi movies, without arousing any suspicions -- and
eliciting only shocked incredulity from its close friends once the truth about
its roots was revealed -- would count as a pretty good outcome on a "blind"
total turing test.

Stevan Harnad
princeton!mind!harnad