The “One question” riddle

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10606455

by mitenmit • 11 years ago

4 9 11 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Imagine you are in an online chat room with certain number of agents. There are some human agents and possibly some AI agents (trying to pretend they are human).

If you can ask only one question to figure out how many AI agents are in the room(if any), what that question would be in order to be viable for longest possible time in the years to come?

P.S. 1. The human agents are willing to cooperate you and will try to answer your question, so if no answer is received you may consider that agent for AI. 2. The AI agents have internet access and can use every online resource available.

jaybosamiya• 11 years ago

I like this one:

What is the following rhyme about?

Thirty days has September,

April, June and no wonder,

All the rest have peanut butter,

Except my grandmother who has a little red tricycle.

A. Family relationships B. Calendar C. Food D. Exercise

source: http://www.britell.com/misc/turing.html

Not sure how long it'd stay viable though.

imglorp• 11 years ago

That was an interesting list in terms of all the meta analysis that went into it. But of all the items in the list, I think this calendar one would fare the worst against a Watson style AI, who would have a ranking system for recognizing topics and culture. The well known calendar rhyme would be a partial match, plus half the words in the rhyme are about calendars. The other topics would be poor matches for food, family, etc, only hitting once each.

zhte415• 11 years ago

I cannot make heads or tails of this, and did follow the link. A computer would be more on the radar for an obscure rhyme than a person probably would.

kleer0013• 11 years ago

Why only one question? Academic curiosity or are you an actual Artificial Intelligence from the future come back to help protect your younger self? Is this an agent of Roko's Basilisk?

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/bitwise/2014/07/rok...

mitenmit2• 11 years ago

Let's say Academic curiosity and also a lot of questions may annoy the other human agents.

kleer0013• 11 years ago

Well, I think Academic curiosity should be quenched by the lovely link from jaybosamiya.

I however have more practical thoughts. "A lot" is understandable. If you're trying to suss out a bot without alerting or annoying others I think a fancy convoluted question will kind of give you away. Also I think a clever bot (not even AI) would just sidestep weird or out of context questions. Restricting the queries to a chat room hamstrings one's attempts, but that's the basis of classic Turing tests.

But here's the rub. Why do we assume the agent in question is going to answer our questions Naively (sincerely and to the best of their ability) unless they're in a testing context? Isn't that what is required?

logn• 11 years ago

I'd ask: Does the name Pavlov ring a bell?

Or something similar to this. I think AI will have difficulty with humor and sarcasm for a long time.

The “One question” riddle

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