Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!ames!xanth!nic.MR.NET!indri!uflorida!haven!vrdxhq!daitc!ida.org!rwex From: rwex@ida.org (Richard Wexelblat) Newsgroups: comp.ai Subject: For Heaven's Sake; was [Re: Turing Test and Subject Bias] Message-ID: <1049@csed-42.IDA.ORG> Date: 1 Jun 89 19:56:06 GMT References: <3018@crete.cs.glasgow.ac.uk> Reply-To: rwex@csed-42.UUCP (Richard Wexelblat) Organization: IDA, Alexandria, VA Lines: 41 Friends, go back and read Turing's paper again. It was a semi-technical (or perhaps non-technical) speculation on whether machines might ever be able to think -- and how we might be able to tell if they do so. Turing described something he called the Artificial Game in which a man, a woman, and an arbiter communicate by teletype. The arbiter cannot see either of the players, but they select between themselves which shall be required to tell the truth and which be permitted to lie. Then both try through conversation and Q and A to convince the arbiter that they are of the gender of the truth-teller. It might well be the case that over a broad selection of players and arbiters, there ought to be reliable statistics of the relative success of the truth-teller and liar. (At least within a group of similar age, education level, social class, nationality, etc.) Now, program a computer to "be intelligent" and give it "experience" sufficient to play the Artificial Game, replacing gender with human/ machine as the deciding factor. (I.e. sometimes the human will be the liar, sometimes the computer.) Turing POSITED that if the win/loss statistics for the human-computer game match those of the man-woman game then the computer might be said to "think." Bias has nothing to do with the test as it is statistical. Given a large enough sample of games played, individual bias can be made insignificant. Please note that Turing was not stating that a machine winning the game would be intelligent; rather he pointed to one whose win/loss statistics were commensurate to those of a human. My library is in transit so I can't check the original text of the paper. I believe, however that an equally valid interpretation of the "Turing Test" is to leave the game roles alone but just change the players. That is, now a man or woman plays one side, a computer the other. The goal, however, is still gender, not origin. I like this formulation better. Note also that the focus of the paper was methodology, not method. There's a big difference in that. -- --Dick Wexelblat (rwex@ida.org) 703 324 5511 (Formerly: rlw@philabs.philps.com)