Artificial Intelligence Could Be on Brink of Passing Turing Test

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/04/turing-test-revisited/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=socialmedia&utm_campaign=wiredscienceclickthru

by leejw00t354 • 14 years ago

71 79 14 years ago

wired.com

debacle2• 14 years ago

TL;DR: Artificial Intelligence Probably Not on Brink of Passing Turing Test

cpeterso• 14 years ago

But Wired says it could be on brink of passing Turing Test! ;)

aashu_dwivedi• 14 years ago

Well I remember a post from a few months back saying artificial intelligence probably needs a reebot.

leejw00t3542• 14 years ago

What exactly does it mean to reboot a field of study?

Take a step back and try to find new, possibly easier approaches?

excuse-me2• 14 years ago

It's generally instigated as an alternative scenario to merely buzzword compliant ongoing forward dynamic enhancement using synergies between interdisciplinary field approaches.

See - all you need is perl, rand and /usr/dict to create an AI that while it can't pass as human can at least obtain a research grant

invalidOrTaken• 14 years ago

I find it hilarious that half an hour after this is posted here, there are no comments. Because, you're right, O HN Reader: they're not even close. But you already knew that without reading TFA, didn't you? And just to satisfy your curiosity, they're talking about Watson-style machines, but then following this talk with quotes about "huge challenges " remaining, which are apparently too insignificant to mention in the title.

walexander• 14 years ago

The Turing Test was a very clever way of describing an AI without having to get into dead end philosophical arguments about what is or isn't intelligence (Ants have very complex social structure and engineering abilities - but are they intelligent?).

Turing picked something uniquely human and used it as a baseline. Unfortunately, what we got is passing the cargo cult turing test, as described in the Chinese Room Experiment.

I think what we all had hoped for, however, was HAL. What we are going to get is more and more iterations of cleverbot.

debacle2• 14 years ago

The problem, of course, is that any heuristic based AI is going to be susceptible to some sort of Voigt-Kampf test which gives it away.

excuse-me2• 14 years ago

Unless you modify the behaviour of the human population to make it more unthinking, repetitive and predicable.

Then it becomes impossible to spot the replicants!

LOL, frist post, l33t ......

code_scrapping• 14 years ago

I agree. The point is that the Turing tests grades the machines capability to mimic, pretend. It's an impressive feat, but that's not what we're looking for.

We are trying to get better ways of gathering new informations, handling unforeseen circumstances, and that's what we're getting in the Hollywood block-busters. Not chat-bots as walexander mentioned.

On the other hand they said:

"The first is the ready availability of vast amounts of raw data — from video feeds to complete sound environments, and from casual conversations to technical documents on every conceivable subject. The second is the advent of sophisticated techniques for collecting, organizing, and processing this rich collection of data."

While first is true, the second is as generic as it gets.

This is a nice overview of the current (comercial) advances, but the title is hyped.

ErrantX• 14 years ago

I think the problem has arisen from a misunderstanding of what Turing was getting at in his paper. At first he talks about Chess (an example chosen, as we know, because it has a well defined rule set) and a computer imitating a Chess player.

He makes the point that, to a human player, it may be difficult to determine between a human player and a computer imitator. Even though the computer is not AI or otherwise "intelligent" it could be mistaken, under the constraints of the test, as human.

Then he sets up the more complex test with the questioning (i.e. "convince me you are a man").

The point there is much the same; at some point it is possible to construct a machine that, within the constraints of the test, is functionally "human". He never claims it as an ultimate test for AI.

IMO the greater point he suggests, which always seems to get glossed over, is this: that at some level of complexity a computer will be able to pass a test (as yet undefined) in which it imitates complete human intelligence to such a degree it appears to be full AI.

That could all be rambling... but that is my understanding of his point.

Over the interim the Turing Test has gotten mixed around and confused to such a degree that this insight is forgotten.

3pt141592• 14 years ago

The Turing test should introduce a completely unexpected set of questions. (double quotes for human, single for AI) "Hi" 'hi, how are you?' "Good. Do you know what we are doing today?" 'Yes, we are attempting to prove that I posses sentient intelligence' "Right. Would you like to prove that you are sentient?" 'Yes' "Excellent. I would like you to design a new five wheeled vehicle for me, can you do that?" 'Yes. Is autocad acceptable?' "Sure. Start with basics though, don't dive in, I'd like to see successful iterations and reasoning about design choices"

Something like that. Otherwise it's all just BS breadth first search through other people's past conversations.

Tuna-Fish• 14 years ago

I have never actually understood the "chinese room experiment".

As formulated in WP, the point is supposed to be that while the room is working, the man in it cannot understand Chinese, so similarly the computer cannot understand it. But isn't this completely pointless, as despite what the man and the computer can or cannot understand, the room or the program can? The man (or the computer) is just a cog in a larger system, and cannot be expected to understand the system, just as none of my individual neurons cannot understand English.

> I think what we all had hoped for, however, was HAL. What we are going to get is more and more iterations of cleverbot.

And what is the difference? When we can build a program that can parse natural language and use it to access information, it will open a whole new technological revolution.

guccimane• 14 years ago

Searle calls your objection the "systems reply", and his response can be found here (2a): http://www.iep.utm.edu/chineser/#H2

zerostar077• 14 years ago

There is a whole line of philosophers of mind who viscerally reject the idea that a deterministic system can 'understand'. They will keep arguing about that even after human-level sentient agents are created. I call these people cryptodualists, because they claim to be non dualists,yet are willing to accept arbitrary hogwash such as qualia, consciousness as a fundamental physical property and the quantum correlates of consciousness.

0003• 14 years ago

Blindsight by Peter Watts hits many of this thread's themes. Sometimes it gets a mention on HN, so a reference for the uninitiated - http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=blindsight+...

EricDeb• 14 years ago

A key element of the chinese room experiment though, is that it excludes the biochemical properties of the brain, which Searle strongly believes is the foundation of human consciousness.

Searle's main point: A deterministic, symbol-manipulating machine can never give rise to the equivalent of human consciousness because traits essential to human consciousness are rooted in the biochemical properties of the brain

Lockyy2• 14 years ago

I dislike the Chinese room experiment.

The argument that he doesn't understand Chinese is like arguing that the hardware itself isn't an AI. No it isn't it is the software that is the AI. It is the set of instructions that he is following that understands Chinese. The argument that the creator of the experiment used against this was that if you removed the pen and paper and had the man do it all in his head, then the man still doesn't understand, but he completely missed the point. In that case it just changes from the pen and paper + man that is the hardware to purely the man.

The Chinese room argument against AI falls down when you remember that the man is only the hardware. He may be essential to the running of the software, but he is just as much the mind of the Chinese translator as my processor is the maths running through it.

Toenex• 14 years ago

I'm glad someone else thinks this too. I feel that the Turing test has largely been a diversion and I don't think Turing intended such a literal interpretation. The point I think Turing was making was that we must look beyond our human experience when we look for intelligence in other forms.

ma2rten6• 14 years ago

I am graduate student in artificial intelligence.

I think what we all had hoped for, however, was HAL. What we are going to get is more and more iterations of cleverbot.

We are getting there. We really are. A lot of iterations further and cleverbot could actually act more human than HAL. If you'd asked me a few month ago I would said that AI is basically just applied statistics, which sometimes manages to look intelligent if you don't look close enough. I changed my mind.

There is some quite recent research in Natural Language Processing/Information Retrieval which manages to blur the line between just statistics over words and really understanding what those words mean (if you define meaning as relations to other symbols).

kubrickslair• 14 years ago

As an ex graduate student in Natural Language Processing/ Machine Learning, I was curious what recent changes occurred that made you see things from a different perspective?

I have not been keeping track of newer research, so would love to know.

spitfire• 14 years ago

Please share more. You can't tease us like that and leave us hanging.

Craiggybear• 14 years ago

> Ants have very complex social structure and engineering abilities - but are they intelligent?

They are differently enabled. Evolution gave them all they need to thrive and be successful. Intelligence is, in evolutionary terms, very expensive, hi-maintenance and often counter-productive. So is individuality. These things are not the natural end-product of an evolutionary process like they are assumed to be. In fact, its normally the exception rather than the rule. Simplicity (seldom complexity, except for a short while and in niche settings) is the end result of a perfected organism in harmony with its environment.

You get what you need for the time frame in which you need it. After that, as soon as you don't need it so much, it will go. Like flight in birds. Dodo's didn't need it, lost it rapidly and then humans arrived. We killed them, tried to eat them and our technology (ships) brought vermin predators (rats and cats) to their world which they had no defence against -- and that was the end of them. Our `intelligence' didn't pan out too well for them. And they're just one example of this sort of thing. Its happening all the time.

When you are sitting in the shattered and burned-out remains of your world (literally or metaphorically), intelligence looks overrated. The same will eventually, inevitably, happen to us. An AI, or our own avaricious greed and ambition, will probably finish us all off.

Big brains, language and tool-making abilities are not necessarily the best or inevitable end outcomes in evolutionary processes. They happen because they need to. Then again, sometimes they don't, and that can pan out OK as well. When it does happen it also tends toward the self-limiting, as well. Just what you need and no more.

The evolution of an AI will be as much an accident as a design. And that's good because it won't be forced into a form that is trying to mimic our own imperfect intelligence.

parsnips• 14 years ago

As soon as Deep Blue was mentioned as AI, I closed that browser tab. Another "journalist" trying to justify a paycheck.

tomelders2• 14 years ago

One thing I've always wondered about turing tests: Wouldn't AI's need to lie a hell of a lot in order to pass it.

For example, if I asked someone to tell me the capital city of every country in the world, I'd be very surprised if they could. However, a half decent AI could do this easily. But what if I pushed it further and started to ask really complex maths questions (something computers are much better at than humans) then It would become clear very quickly that I'm talking to a machine.

Also, humans have holes in their knowledge. For example, given the question "Who is the prime minister of the Netherlands?" the answer for most people is going to be, "I don't know". Or what about "Which team won the first ever FA cup?". Despite not knowing the answer (The Royal Electrical & Mechanical Engineers) most people would hazard a guess (Manchester United, Liverpool) and be wrong.

Programming an AI to play dumb would be relatively easy. But what use is an AI that lies? Passing the test may well be possible, but what use is Artificial intelligence that pretends to as dumb as humans?

recursive• 14 years ago

The AI might not need to play dumb. There's no reason I can think of that an AI must be good at math or embed encyclopedias. Asimov had a short story, whose name I can't remember, about an AI that believed it was human.

tikhonj• 14 years ago

I think it isn't so much that an AI has a good reason for that but rather that there is no good reason to have an AI incapable of it.

Of course, an alternate solution may be just around the corner--imagine talking to a person who has some sort of direct interface to Wlfram|Alpha (maybe Google glasses or something like that)--he would be able to answer those questions as easily as a computer, for the same reasons.

jbattle• 14 years ago

I'd never thought of this - but it's interesting that one of the foundational things we'd be teaching this AI is to lie to/deceive humans. Seems like a bad starting place.

Of course, the turing test isn't REALLY some kind of gateway through which a strong AI is probable to develop, but still

bluedanieru2• 14 years ago

This is just a weakness of the original formulation of the Turing Test - for a machine to fool a human into believing that it is, in fact, a human. But we don't really need that, do we? What we need is for an AI to "fool" us into believing it is truly intelligent. For that, I don't care if it knows all the capitals or can do complex maths. In fact I expect it to be able to do that. I already know it's a machine, after all.

Unfortunately that is far more subjective test. It's easy to devise an experiment based on the classic Turing Test, you just put some people in a room with some terminals, some of which are wired to computers and some of which are wired to humans, and have at it. But it doesn't tell you much, really. But whether a machine that can convince you it is intelligent, is in fact intelligent, is not really a scientific question, and as such doesn't really have a scientific (that is to say, satisfying) answer.

What I'm getting at with this is that the important question to ask about AI is the same question you can ask about other humans, and the answer for either is the same. The difference is that solipsism is a lot easier when you're talking about machines.

axxl• 14 years ago

I feel that one day computers will start trying to convince us they're intelligent, and we won't be listening.

drcube2• 14 years ago

You assume that any AI worth the label will already be as capable as current PCs.

But perhaps there is a tradeoff? Maybe becoming "intelligent" in the way we understand it is incompatible with the "dumb calculator/encyclopedia" capabilities of regular computers? Maybe true AI will necessarily lose the ability to look anything up instantly or calculate large columns of numbers?

I don't really believe that, but it is a possibility.

tomelders2• 14 years ago

I've sort of had the same idea. I've wondered wether the power required to have a robot process all it would need to in order to move around and interact with the world by responding to all the different stimuli (optical, audio, kinetic) wouldn't leave many CPU cycles left for doing the super human things we're used to computers doing.

leejw00t3542• 14 years ago

Here is one of my favourite articles on the Turing Test.

The method described in this article appears similar in its approach, "Suppose, for a moment, that all the words you have ever spoken, heard, written, or read, as well as all the visual scenes and all the sounds you have ever experienced, were recorded and accessible".

https://sites.google.com/site/asenselessconversation/

nsomaru• 14 years ago

Such a load of speculation, psssht. Why is this on the front page?

cs702• 14 years ago

Despite its hyped-up title, this Wired news piece contains no real news of scientific advances. In fact, I can summarize it in one sentence: "with more and more data coming online, and with sophisticated techniques for collecting, organizing, and processing all this data, computers might soon be able to fool the Turing Test."

ppod2• 14 years ago

What's the difference between collecting, organizing, and processing data, and intelligence?

zoul• 14 years ago

The ability to solve problems that fall outside the envelope of your harvested and processed data?

drallison• 14 years ago

We are moving into a post-literate world. "Artificial Intelligence" is a field of endeavor, not an entity that can try to pass a test. The headline is not as bad as movie stars and news anchors using objective pronouns as the subject of a sentence, but it still shows that the language is changing, and not for the better, IMHO.

tambourine_man• 14 years ago

The contemporary approach: no new theoretical breakthrough? Pick an old model and throw more data at it.

jakeonthemove• 14 years ago

We already have a sort of AI that can be used for real world applications - it's called the Internet. Using Google, Facebook, Wikipedia and dozens of other sites, it's relatively easy to create a robot that can do quite a lot of things - the problem is that creating the actual physical body of the robot is expensive - humans are cheaper and still do everything better.

We don't even need AI, we need robots for specific tasks that would also be programmed to work around any potential issues (most of which can be identified and programmed if the field of application is narrow enough) - making them create workarounds/solutions for new problems would be awesome and all, but it's not necessary, IMO.

stungeye• 14 years ago

Like some others have said, the Turing Test is more a human mimicry test than a test of intelligence or consciousness. We humans love to anthropomorphize, so tricking us into believing a machine is human shouldn't be how we gauge the effectiveness of our AI.

I ran across these "Fundamental Principles of Cognition" that might do a better job:

Principle 1. Object Identification (Categorization)

Principle 2. Minimal Parsing ("Occam’s Razor")

Principle 3. Object Prediction (Pattern Completion)

Principle 4. Essence Distillation (Analogy Making)

Principle 5. Quantity Estimation and Comparison (Numerosity Perception)

Principle 6. Association-Building by Co-occurrence (Hebbian Learning)

Principle 6½. Temporal Fading of Rarity (Learning by Forgetting)

See: http://www.foundalis.com/res/poc/PrinciplesOfCognition.htm

Also, Hofstadter suggests some similar "essential abilities for intelligence".

1. To respond to situations very flexibility.

2. To make sense out of ambiguous or contradictory messages.

3. To recognize the relative importance of different elements of a situation.

4. To find similarities between situations despite differences, which may separate them.

5. To draw distinctions between situations despite similarities, which may link them.

bandy• 14 years ago

Ah, another rehash the "AI springs forth from complexity" argument. This is entertainingly laid out in "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress", "Colossus: The Forbin Project", "The Adolescence of P1", "Man Plus", etc.

lectrick• 14 years ago

This article is wildly speculative. :/

nextparadigms• 14 years ago

A few months ago there was a rumor about a Google X AI project that passes the Turing Test 93% of the time in an IM conversation:

http://www.webpronews.com/is-google-x-all-about-highly-intel...

tomerv• 14 years ago

Wouldn't passing the Turing Test 93% of the time mean that the machine does a better job of pretending to be human than an actual human? I'd expect 50% success to be the target.

batista4• 14 years ago

I could just mean the result number is readjusted based on the baseline figure.

iRobot• 14 years ago

One of these posts was from an AI. Can you tell which one?

drcube2• 14 years ago

I think of the Turing test not as an actual experiment that can be performed, but more of a first crack at a working definition of intelligence.

Sort of like Shannon said "Let's leave 'meaning' to the psychologists, and define 'information' based on properties inherent in the message itself" and ended up revolutionizing information theory.

Turing is saying "Stop bickering over 'comprehension' and 'intent'. Can we just agree that if a machine can fool an intelligent human being into thinking it is also an intelligent human being - based only on its information output rather than its physical shape - that machine deserves the label 'intelligent'?"

And I agree. Philosophers can argue about the internal state of that mind all they want. But if I can converse and crack jokes with my new computer buddy, I have no qualms about calling him intelligent. At least until he blue screens and finally fails the test by spitting out a hex dump.

bfrs3• 14 years ago

If siri 5.0 or Cyc 1000000.0 passes the Turing test, it will be the same story all over again...the goal posts will be moved one more time. People will say that passing the Turing test is not really a mark of true intelligence, its just an imitation!

Artificial Intelligence Could Be on Brink of Passing Turing Test

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