Response by Ray Kurzweil to chatbot Eugene Goostman “passing the Turing test”

http://www.kurzweilai.net/response-by-ray-kurzweil-to-the-announcement-of-chatbot-eugene-goostman-passing-the-turing-test

by ca98am79 • 12 years ago

331 154 12 years ago

kurzweilai.net

Zikes• 12 years ago

I've had more believable conversations with CleverBot. It's hard to believe this hoax has gone as far as it has.

batmansbelt• 12 years ago

Cleverbot is all non-sequiturs. Nothing ever remotely makes sense.

drdeca• 12 years ago

It is possible to get it into a chain of counting though. Eg user says four, it says five, user says 6, it says seven, and that goes on for a while.

(edit:So that's not completely non sequitur things)

I don't think I've ever seen a chatbot on a web page that can do addition. (unless one counts wolfram|alpha: it does respond to greetings after all.)

jgrahamc4• 12 years ago

This is a nicely written and clear explanation of why the announcement by the University of Reading is bullshit. In fact, it is was more than they deserve. Way more.

I would suggest shunning them is the right response.

The University of Reading is, of course, the august institution behind:

http://blog.jgc.org/2010/05/inside-rfid-virus.html

http://blog.jgc.org/2006/12/midas-number-or-why-divide-by-ze...

gpjt• 12 years ago

And Kevin Warwick is the chap who had an RFID (or similar) chip implanted in his arm and put out a press release declaring himself a cyborg: http://www.kevinwarwick.com/Cyborg1.htm

jgrahamc4• 12 years ago

Yes, I wasn't going to mention that because I've had a cybernetic cat (by Warwick's standards) for years.

And his definition of a cyborg here is bullshit. Anyone with a heart pacemaker is much closer to a cyborg than someone with a RFID chip in their arm. Hell, they are being kept alive by a machine! The first pacemaker implants date to the late 1950s.

reccles• 12 years ago

I'd be impressed if the entire press release turns out to be the AI

jacquesm4• 12 years ago

It's the university of Reading after all, that means they must have outsourced the other half. (ok, cheap shot, I just could not resist)

bencoder• 12 years ago

As someone who went to the University of Reading, this is pretty sad to me. I do wish they would stop devaluing my (and my peers') education with this nonsense.

bencollier49• 12 years ago

Likewise.

rahimnathwani• 12 years ago

s/education/credentials

billmalarky2• 12 years ago

What does the term "august institution" mean. Can't find any good definitions on google.

grok2• 12 years ago

au·gust adjective \ȯ-ˈgəst, ˈȯ-(ˌ)gəst\

: having a formal and impressive quality

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/august

gadders• 12 years ago

Good summary from the Register as well: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/06/10/world_to_captain_cyb...

robotresearcher3• 12 years ago

There's not much wrong with the University of Reading.

Kevin Warwick, on the other hand is a complex character who errs on the side of hype and unjustified self-publicity much too often. He is not taken very seriously in academic AI and robotics, except when he causes a collective face-palm with claims like this.

The press release people at Reading, or pretty much anywhere else, do not have the skills to assess whether their professor is begin daft or not.

balls187• 12 years ago

You might say he is the Ken Rockwell of Computer Science.

fuzzix• 12 years ago

"Every good scientist is half B. F. Skinner and half P. T. Barnum"

I've seen Warwick speak. He's not afraid to throw science away completely in favour of making a dramatic point.

I remember him claiming his flesh "embraced" an implant by growing around it when he described the typical immune rejection response he experienced.

higherpurpose• 12 years ago

The whole thing sounded iffy to me from the first second I heard about it, despite the fact that most of the tech media was going ga-ga over it. I mean, the AI being only a teenage Hungarian boy (meaning the judges should've expected it to be "less intelligent than a normal native adult")...and only fooling 1/3 of the judges? That sounds like a whole lot of cheating to declare that it "passed" the Turing test.

oxalo• 12 years ago

Yeah after reading Ray's conversation with the bot, I was surprised that 30% of the judges were fooled. I guess maybe they were also 13 years old and had English as a second language.

ma2rten• 12 years ago

I will explain this mystery to you: they simply did not ask any probing questions like that. This is also called the ELIZA effect

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA_effect

bentcorner• 12 years ago

You are now chatting with babybot

You:> Hi, how are you?

Babybot:> asdfasdfu3898bzasgasdlasdl3897a9sdf79as87fd

orbifold• 12 years ago

Pretty much any question that requires actual natural language understanding would presumably instantly reveal a bot today, like 'Is white darker than black?'.

Houshalter2• 12 years ago

It's not that simple. NLP has gotten good enough that there actually are systems which can answer questions like that. IBM's Watson can quickly sort through a massive number of documents for an answer. There are projects that have built massive databases of common sense knowledge like Cyc, which could possibly answer that question. And then large databases of human responses like cleverbot which probably already has been asked that at least once and can find it in it's database.

throwawayaway2• 12 years ago

When are they going to start considering the other side of the Turing test - if a robot passes - a human fails it.

jere• 12 years ago

First thing I've read by Kurzweil that didn't make me rage. I fully expected him to chalk this up as more evidence that the singularity is well on schedule or he's going to win Long Bet #1. Glad to hear him being critical:

I chatted with the chatbot Eugene Goostman, and was not impressed. Eugene does not keep track of the conversation, repeats himself word for word, and often responds with typical chatbot non sequiturs.

resu_nimda2• 12 years ago

I think your assumptions are somewhat unfair. Despite his bold and often fanciful predictions, he's a really smart guy with a history of impressive technological contributions. He's gotten a bad reputation in recent years for his outspoken certainty in the impending singularity (which, as seen in Transcendent Man, is somewhat tragically driven by the loss of his father and the hope of somehow reanimating his father's persona through technology), but he hasn't "lost it" or anything. I fully expected him to be critical of this test.

mantrax5• 12 years ago

After all the indiscriminate B.S. published in the media for this software "passing the Turing test", kudos to Ray Kurzweil for calling it like it is, despite he of all people has very serious reasons to be in the "I want to believe" team. Respect.

byteface• 12 years ago

We also should specify the intelligence of the human...

Maybe one-day there'll be a test where we have to convince a super intelligent sentient machine that we can be more than just human...

Tloewald• 12 years ago

Kurzweil is right to be unimpressed. This chatbot is actually less impressive than Racter which dates back to the early 80s (and used similar and cleverer distraction tactics such as going off on tangents and basically being completely nuts).

psykovsky• 12 years ago

I've had better bots nagging me to signup to cam sites on MSN/ICQ... Unimpressed is putting it lightly ;)

jaryd• 12 years ago

In regards to his prediction that a machine will pass the Turing test by 2029 Ray writes: "Today, my prediction appears to be median view. So, I am gratified that a growing group of people now think that I am being too conservative."

Great stuff!

ogig• 12 years ago

I'm surprised by the impact of Eugene. After trying the web interface I felt like myself could have written a similar chatter bot that of course would have been ignored by everyone, with good reason.

macspoofing6• 12 years ago

Yep. I've seen IRC bots in 2004 with similar levels of 'intelligence'.

CmonDev• 12 years ago

It's basically a software automaton, not an AI in any way.

netcan2• 12 years ago

'Apparently, we have now entered the era of premature announcements of a computer having passed Turing’s eponymous test'

What this Eugene stuff has made me realize is that we need milestones around the Turing test in the pop-science lexicon, rather than just a pass fail. Kurzweil's right, this bot isn't a pass in anything like the spirit of the test. But, getting attention is a good thing. It encourages potential students and engages the public.

Maybe there could be a few variants of the test based on bot age, bot native language, judge age, judge proficiency, etc. These could be scored these by the percentage of judges fooled.

That way a new bot could break a previous record on one or more variant of the test. PR fodder. Legitimate accolades. The headlines could mean something. Fewer cranky nerds.

Kurzweil could do promote this.

jacquesm4• 12 years ago

Getting attention like this is a bad thing. AI has been oversold for decades and stunts like this make real AI efforts look bad. That's one of the reasons I presume Kurzweil is very sharp to denounce this, the last thing we need is a re-run of the AI winter courtesy of some University hot for some attention.

netcan2• 12 years ago

Let me try to phrase that differently. I'm not trying to legitimize bad stunts. I'm suggesting giving them a legitimate way of getting that PR instead.

Researchers, hobbyists and porn sellers working on chatbots. The definition of success is the Turing test. To give themselves goals and brag about those goals in media, they enter Turing test contests and try to get a "passing" score relatively to arbitrary definitions of pass.

Some will inevitably get overenthusiastic about the achievements. It will go int the press and that's where overpraising wolf crying comes from.

I propose to fixe this by giving contestants a legitimate target to aim for. Something that naturally produces PR fodder in 256 characters. "New Chatbot achieves 38% on the Eugene-13 Turing Test." That could mean something real and honest.

Some variants of the test are complete BS. Some are not. They may not be an indication of consciousness (that's what the one we've got is for) but beating our previous best does represent a legitimate milestone.

A lot of them could be interesting. Some variants of the test could focus on tasks/scenarios. For example, an AI receptionist. Others (maybe Eugene-13) could be a handicap version to the real Turing test.

rcucinotta• 12 years ago

Kudos to Kurzweil for calling them out. That chatbot doesn't look especially sophisticated.

r0muald• 12 years ago

I don't think you don't think that I don't think you don't need to change your opinions. Where do you came from, by the way? Could you tell me about the place where you live?

Actual quote from EG

fidotron• 12 years ago

Warwick is just an attention seeking fruitcake, and an utter embarrassment to the entire British computing ecosystem. This isn't some new revelation either. Quite why he's tolerated at all is beyond me.

Kurzweil is being too kind.

robotresearcher3• 12 years ago

More than tolerated:

http://www.kevinwarwick.com/achievements.htm

You can go a long way with the publicity, er, focus.

drzaiusapelord• 12 years ago

The answers Ray got back are borderline embarrassing. They're designed to deflect the question by ignoring the request and asking another unrelated question or deflecting by humor. These are common ploys in faking AI chat. Hell, what 13 yo calls himself a "little boy?" I was in 8th grade at 13 and looking forward to high school. I can't imagine calling myself a "little boy" at an age when some of my peers were sexually active.

I think this proves that the Turing Test is more or less crap. Humans, who are easily fooled/socially engineered, can't just decide that "this is AI," like its some kind of American Idol-like contest. There should be some rational metric at work here. A bunch of different tests and human judgement as only one part of the testing suite.

Look at what IBM has been doing with Watson. It may never pass this test, but its probably the closest we have to AI (generalist self-learning system). Maybe this event will be the excuse we finally need to lay Turing's test to bed, permanently.

kriro• 12 years ago

"""I think this proves that the Turing Test is more or less crap. Humans, who are easily fooled/socially engineered, can't just decide that "this is AI," like its some kind of American Idol-like contest. There should be some rational metric at work here. A bunch of different tests and human judgement as only one part of the testing suite."""

I think the easiest fix is to crowd source the Turing test. If you can fool 95% of all people chatting with you over a sample of >100k people you're probably pretty good.

ccozan2• 12 years ago

Indeed embarrassing. Actually, I can't believe that they called this chat-bot in any way intelligent. On top of that, this level of chat is the same since 90s, how come nothing has changed? And anyway, text chatting is/will never be a measure of intelligence, the Turing test in this form should never be considered.

You really need to live 13 years as a boy to be able to answer as one.

jacquesm4• 12 years ago

I've seen better in the 90's.

cardine• 12 years ago

Not much has changed because the people, companies, and institutions capable of making such improvements are now focusing on things with actual real world application.

protonfish• 12 years ago

I wouldn't go so far as to say the test is crap, but I agree it is given more importance than it deserves. It makes sense that if humans are intelligent and a machine behaves in the same manner, we would have to conclude that the machine is also intelligent. That cleverly punts over the entire discussion of the qualities and mechanism of intelligence. Another thing to keep in mind is although the Turing test could prove an entity is intelligent, it cannot prove that a thing is not intelligent. The most intelligent non-human species on our planet won't pass, but it doesn't mean they are stupid, it just means they aren't human.

rm445• 12 years ago

It's not crap, it's just a continuum. There are already chatbots that 'pass' sufficiently well to keep lonely people sending them salacious text messages. And presumably when the day comes that the robots are marching on Washington DC to argue for their rights, pretty much everyone will be convinced. For every step in between there will be 'AI's that fool more of the people, more of the time.

Hold on, you may say, we're talking about chatbots progressively fooling people, not 'real' artificial intelligence. But with better chatting comes better functional intelligence. For my bank's chatbot to converse sufficiently well to provide useful customer service requires it to understand all sorts of language and questions. For a personal avatar to take all your messages or make you fall in love with it (like that recent movie) requires even more capability. Whether it can ever transition into fully sapient consciousness verges on philosophy or, at any rate, is a question we can't answer yet.

pessimizer2• 12 years ago

The only aspect where this chatbot seems better than ELIZA is that it can query the internet for state capitals. That's 50 years of a complete lack of advancement.

damon_c• 12 years ago

Clearly if the criteria for passing the Turing test rests on this 30% of judges "fooled" threshold, we need to add a screen for the judges themselves...

redshirtrob• 12 years ago

Yeah, I'd like to see if those "judges" could pass the Turing Test themselves.

pbhjpbhj4• 12 years ago

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/jun/09/turing-test-e... is by one of the judges, Robert Llewellyn is a TV presenter (eg scrapheap challenge) and was an actor (eg Red Dwarf, a comic sci-fi series). He apparently was a judge.

He mentions a Professor Martin Smith in the article as a judge too. http://www.mdx.ac.uk/aboutus/staffdirectory/martin-smith.asp... [which page I've just noticed mentions scrapheap challenge].

.. and following that line I note that Professor Kevin Warwick appears to have history with both Llewellyn (promoting Warwick's book in 2002 here, http://www.reddwarf.co.uk/news/2002/11/08/roberts-robots/) and Smith .. which might make this a case of him having gathered a few cronies together to generate some publicity?

Is there a record of the event somewhere that could disavow me of the result simply being a case of partial judges being generous towards a friend?

fixermark• 12 years ago

Different tests are a good idea, but the devil is in designing them.

They'd have to both tell us something useful about the possibly-intelligent agent in question and not disallow anyone who we would consider an intelligent agent (more specifically, there's a whole suite of tests we could hypothetically use that would need to be discarded because they'd rule out entire sets of humanity as non-intelligence. Oops :-p)

rickhanlonii• 12 years ago

Can anyone clarify this for me?

Professor Warwick claims that the test was “unrestricted.” However, having the chatbot claim to be a 13-year-old child, and one for whom English is not a first language, is effectively a restriction.

Kurzweil seems to say that the bot lying is a restriction, but the Kapor-Kurzweil Turing Test Session rules explicitly allow the bot to lie about who they are[1]:

Neither the Turing Test Human Foils nor the Computer are required to tell the truth about their histories or other matters. All of the candidates are allowed to respond with fictional histories.

I suppose he's just addressing Professor Warwick's claim. Nevertheless this point doesn't seem to make any difference to what Kurzweil would consider a passing bot and the casual reader is baited into saying "The bot failed because it lied it's history."

[1] http://www.kurzweilai.net/a-wager-on-the-turing-test-the-rul...

StavrosK• 12 years ago

No, he means that the restriction is that the bot is making it "easier on itself" by claiming to not speak English well. It reduces the expectations on itself by that trick.

PhasmaFelis• 12 years ago

Kurzweil seems to say that the bot lying is a restriction

I think he means that placing it in a limited domain of humanity, specifically one that would be expected to make lots of basic errors, is a restriction, since it makes things much easier on the bot.

What really gets me is that, on top of that, they arbitrarily declared that success was a 30% pass rate instead of 50%. The rest of it is bad enough, but how on earth did anyone think that was acceptable?

qbrass• 12 years ago

The funny part is that it actually is 13 years old, and has a Russian/Ukrainian parentage.

TeMPOraL• 12 years ago

Between this and Nobel Peace Prize I notice that one after another, the things that used to have some meaning are being bastardized by people looking for attention. Those people are destroying important cultural symbols for five minutes of fame.

ambler02• 12 years ago

I think most people misunderstand the intent of Turing's paper in which he describes his eponymous test. I agree with Chomsky's reading, which he laid out in "Language & Thought":

"There is a great deal of often heated debate about these matters in the literature of the cognitive sciences, artificial intelligence, and philosophy of mind, but it is hard to see that any serious question has been posed. The question of whether a computer is playing chess, or doing long division, or translating Chinese, is like the question of whether robots can murder or airplanes can fly -- or people; after all, the "flight" of the Olympic long jump champion is only an order of magnitude short of that of the chicken champion (so I'm told). These are questions of decision, not fact; decision as to whether to adopt a certain metaphoric extension of common usage.

There is no answer to the question whether airplanes really fly (though perhaps not space shuttles). Fooling people into mistaking a submarine for a whale doesn't show that submarines really swim; nor does it fail to establish the fact. There is no fact, no meaningful question to be answered, as all agree, in this case. The same is true of computer programs, as Turing took pains to make clear in the 1950 paper that is regularly invoked in these discussions. Here he pointed out that the question whether machines think "may be too meaningless to deserve discussion," being a question of decision, not fact, though he speculated that in 50 years, usage may have "altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted" -- as in the case of airplanes flying (in English, at least), but not submarines swimming. Such alteration of usage amounts to the replacement of one lexical item by another one with somewhat different properties. There is no empirical question as to whether this is the right or wrong decision.

In this regard, there has been serious regression since the first cognitive revolution, in my opinion. Superficially, reliance on the Turing test is reminiscent of the Cartesian approach to the existence of other minds. But the comparison is misleading. The Cartesian experiments were something like a litmus test for acidity: they sought to determine whether an object has a certain property, in this case, possession of mind, one aspect of the world. But that is not true of the artificial intelligence debate.

Another superficial similarity is the interest in simulation of behavior, again only apparent, I think. As I mentioned earlier, the first cognitive revolution was stimulated by the achievements of automata, much as today, and complex devices were constructed to simulate real objects and their functioning: the digestion of a duck, a flying bird, and so on. But the purpose was not to determine whether machines can digest or fly. Jacques de Vaucanson, the great artificer of the period, was concerned to understand the animate systems he was modeling; he constructed mechanical devices in order to formulate and validate theories of his animate models, not to satisfy some performance criterion."

http://www.chomsky.info/books/prospects01.htm

macspoofing6• 12 years ago

Fooling people into mistaking a submarine for a whale doesn't show that submarines really swim

Why not? Presumably part of the act of fooling would involve 'swimming' submarines.

I think passing a __strong__ Turing test actually does say something about our brains, cognition, and consciousness. And by a 'strong Turing test', I don't mean dinky 5 minute tests with a "Ukrainian boy". Imagine you carry on a 20 year relationship with a computer pen-pal, having in-depth discussions about every-day things from movies, to music, to sports to family and relationships. Imagine such a computer program fooling every human it interacts with for decades at a time, I think that would say something about ourselves and I think it would render the question of consciousness meaningless. If it quacks like a duck, looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and you can't tell the difference between it and a duck, it's a duck.

Another problem is that philosophers and even regular people tend to relish in ambiguity when it comes to certain ideas and concepts, even trying to elevate them to supernatural levels. Things like free will, love, or consciousness are apparently outside of the natural world, and not subject to natural laws. I think that's wrong. I think the answer is much simpler and much more humbling than we are willing to admit.

usumoio• 12 years ago

I agree. The only proof you have that I am a conscience being is that you believe that to be so because I conduct myself as one. You can't really prove that I am or am not conscience. You can only observe that I act like a conscience being.

ambler02• 12 years ago

I think we agree. And I think Turing's point in choosing a conversation as the test was to pick something that would indicate the vast range of human experience. If a computer could pass a strong version of the test as you describe, then I would agree that we would have say, as you do, "if it looks like a duck, .... then it is a duck."

But I don't agree that it renders the concept of conciousness meaningless (or at least any more meangingless, depending on what you think about the concept now). On the contrary, I think we might have to say, "this computer is probably concious", and afford it all of the rights that we do for humans.

BTW I don't think either Turing or Chomsky would say that >Things like free will, love, or consciousness are apparently outside of the natural world

I obviously don't speak for either of them, but I'm pretty sure they both subscribe to the theory of causal determinism and computational theory of mind.

ddt• 12 years ago

My big takeaway from the Chomsky quote is that it's useless to ask if computers can think because one of the fundamental properties we associate with thinking is some biological/spiritual aspect. For a computer to "think", we'd need to redefine what we mean by think. And if we have to redefine what it means to think, why bother hailing it as an accomplishment to make a computer "think". The properties are incredibly important to our understanding of the world. The fact that we have different words for "think", "compute", and "calculate" gives some insight into the value we assign to the distinction as a culture. If those differentiations didn't exist, the problem of simulating cognition wouldn't change. What would change is our perception of the problem. If thinking, calculation, and computation all share the same word, it becomes a question of degrees of "thinking" rather than substantially different processes.

I don't think Chomsky is trying to elevate certain things outside of the laws of nature. He's describing how what we choose to differentiate changes our fundamental perceptions of those things. Submarines could "swim". They could also "read", but those words have a very specific set of properties associated with them.

pizza234• 12 years ago

There are a few problems with this line of reasoning.

First, that there is an implicit assumption about how cognition and consciousness are defined, but there is no real definition.

Following the example, it's not defined what a duck is, and "philosophers" actually don't try to elevate the question - they try to find answers to it.

While a "strong" test for example would look appealing, the problem is that there is no real model of weakness/strenght, and while a human would pass all the possible models of humanity, a computer would surely pass only the ones it's programmed for.

Another thing is that in order for a computer to truly mimic a human, that is, to fool people for 20 years about movies/music/sports/family/relationships, but also other abstract experiences, the computer would need to experience them, and especially, elaborate them in a human way.

Which is again, very "open", and it's the core problem.

Even excluding the openness problem, the Turing test in the way it's posed, looks to me as the photorealism problem. You can achieve it in a static picture, but once you freely move in a 3D world, you see the flaws that show that what you're experiencing in reality is a limited set of limited algorithms, which are used to workaround hard problems (workaround is the key).

I think exactly the same arguments stand, that is, in order to mimic a human in such a high level of faithfulness, very hard problems would need to be solved, not just worked around.

Paradigma11• 12 years ago

I would guess that most contemporary philosophers do not fall into this traps but naturally they get no attention.

Why?

Journalists/ Interested parties ask philosopher about the mind/body problem, the matter of truth, god.... and if 9 out 10 answer that there is no real problem just misconceptions then the journalist will go to the 10th one who will get air time.

md2245• 12 years ago

Imagine such a computer program fooling every human it interacts with for decades at a time, I think that would say something about ourselves and I think it would render the question of consciousness meaningless.

Maybe we're operating with different notions of "the question of consciousness", but I have to disagree that a perfect simulation of a human mind would dissolve the problem. And by "the problem" I mean the Hard Problem of Consciousness, the issue of how the hell the subjective experience of being arises in a lump of bloody meat (or in anything, really).

I suppose my question to you is this: do you believe there is something it is like to BE that simulation, to have a first-person subjective experience from the perspective of the computer?

I agree with you that elevating certain aspects of reality to "supernatural" status is unhelpful; it's the equivalent of saying "sorry scientists, but this stuff is out of bounds." (I'm also not convinced that dividing reality into natural and supernatural is even a coherent distinction, but that's another discussion.) However, I have to take issue with your suggestion that the answer to consciousness is "much simpler... than we are willing to admit." It may turn out that a future science will come up with a very satisfying answer to the Hard Problem of Consciousness, but I suspect that this will require a paradigm shift so radical that it will make current neuroscience look like phlogiston theory.

mtdewcmu• 12 years ago

>If it quacks like a duck, looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and you can't tell the difference between it and a duck, it's a duck.

If, later, you discover evidence contrary to it having been a duck, can you revise your belief? Or was your having been convinced of its duck-ness sufficient to make it a duck?

pbhjpbhj4• 12 years ago

If it quacks like a duck, looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and you can't tell the difference between it and a duck, it's a duck. //

Just because you can't tell that something is false, or perhaps just can't elucidate the reason, doesn't make it true.

hawkharris• 12 years ago

I wonder if there's an analogy to be made here with security competitions. I'm talking about the "Earn $50,000 if you can hack us" events that companies use to illustrate the integrity of their systems.

The problem is that security competitions usually involve a carefully constructed definition of "hacking" and what makes a system "secure." Many people become so engrossed in the terminology that they forget to think about security from a practical standpoint.

"In the wild," as many people say, the lexical questions are largely irrelevant and the practical ones are king. It's hard to predict exactly how someone will conceive of and interact with a system. Trying to define those interactions with restrictive terms and metaphors tends to be counterproductive.

Admittedly, some of Chomsky's writing goes over my head at times, but that's what I take away from this small snippet.

noonespecial• 12 years ago

Turing test and all it's connotative baggage aside, the first chatbot that will impress me is the one where I can't for the life of me figure out how it's creating the responses it is.

"Eugene", I can imagine creating when I was 12.

jamesbrownuhh• 12 years ago

Absolutely. Responses like Eugene's seem straight out of the "Eliza" program I typed into my home computer (out of a magazine) in the mid 1980s. If Eugene is the new state of the art, as some have claimed, it doesn't seem that there has been any progress at all in the last 30 years.

Perhaps next year the test will be won by Ham Hamuelson, an AI persona who managed to convince the judges that he was a talking ham sandwich. I guess we can't completely rule that out.

blauwbilgorgel6• 12 years ago

The chatbot Eugene Goostman did not pass Ray Kurzweil's version of the Turing Test. It passed the Turing Test as set up by the organizers.

Turing never even mentioned the criteria that participants should be aware that they are possibly talking to a computer. This single criteria should not matter for intelligence IMO, because the whole point of the test was to abstract away the appearance. The other way around: a chatbot doesn't pass the test if a participant mistakes a human for a machine.

People fail the Turing Test all the time when unaware of chat scripts. Even some upvoted Hackernews comments may have been artificially generated without being detected as such.

The best way for me to detect if something is up, is to ask the chatbot about Alan Turing, 42 and the Turing Test. Then to curse at it. Most chatbot makers can't resist adding lines specifically for these questions, or they show feigned annoyance that is easy to pick up on. I got Goostman to admit that he was a Turing Test and then we talked about bots some more. Eugene ended with:

I call all these chatter-bots "chatter-nuts" due to their extremely high intelligence. I hope you recognize irony.

Full conversation here: http://pastebin.com/Wf4uiCRf

DanBC4• 12 years ago

Turing never even mentioned the criteria that participants should be aware that they are possibly talking to a computer.

What? Here's what he said. It seems pretty clear that this version of the game involves one human interrogator, one human and one computer, and the interrogator has to decide which is human and which isn't.

The new form of the problem can be described in terms of a game which we call the 'imitation game." It is played with three people, a man (A), a woman (B), and an interrogator (C) who may be of either sex. The interrogator stays in a room apart front the other two. The object of the game for the interrogator is to determine which of the other two is the man and which is the woman. He knows them by labels X and Y, and at the end of the game he says either "X is A and Y is B" or "X is B and Y is A." The interrogator is allowed to put questions to A and B thus:
C: Will X please tell me the length of his or her hair?
Now suppose X is actually A, then A must answer. It is A's object in the game to try and cause C to make the wrong identification. His answer might therefore be:
"My hair is shingled, and the longest strands are about nine inches long."
In order that tones of voice may not help the interrogator the answers should be written, or better still, typewritten. The ideal arrangement is to have a teleprinter communicating between the two rooms. Alternatively the question and answers can be repeated by an intermediary. The object of the game for the third player (B) is to help the interrogator. The best strategy for her is probably to give truthful answers. She can add such things as "I am the woman, don't listen to him!" to her answers, but it will avail nothing as the man can make similar remarks.
We now ask the question, "What will happen when a machine takes the part of A in this game?" Will the interrogator decide wrongly as often when the game is played like this as he does when the game is played between a man and a woman? These questions replace our original, "Can machines think?"

blauwbilgorgel6• 12 years ago

The specifics of the Turing Test have been debated for decades. It is clear that different versions and interpretations exist, especially now we have moved on from behaviorism that was popular during the time Turing wrote the paper.

From your quotes it only says that player A is to be replaced with a machine, not that player C is to be made aware of this replacement. I do agree that that is the popular interpretation, but it isn't written down, leading to this ambiguity.

the interrogator has to decide which is human and which isn't.

The interrogator has to decide which is female and which is male. Replace the female or male with a computer, not making the interrogator aware of this and see if the interrogator is wrong as often as before.

Kurzweil questions this bot, as if it was a bot. He is aware that he is talking to a bot, and doesn't even have to choose between A or B.

Kurzweil's line of questioning is not fair or normal or productive communication even if it was between two humans. A 13- year-old boy would have told Kurzweil to bugger off when tasked to answer 2+2 or wouldn't have responded at all.

Repeat questions like that in a random chatroom and people will think that you are the chatbot.

x1798DE• 12 years ago

The article's title is "Response by Ray Kurzweil to the announcement of chatbot Eugene Goostman passing the Turing test". Pretty critical distinction between that and reacting to it actually passing a Turing test. If the HN title is going to be changed for brevity, then it should probably be changed to something like 'Response by Ray Kurzweil to chatpot Eugene Goostman "passing the Turing test"', or something else that conveys the actual sentiment of the post (which is that this chatbot isn't anything special and isn't close to being able to pass any real Turing test).

blazespin• 12 years ago

Until computers can think with the same levels of cognitive problem solving and emotional complexity that real people have, the turing test will not be passed. 2029 is an aggressive date.

computator2• 12 years ago

Kurzweil's and Mitch Kapor's rules on how to judge a Turing Test are well thought out ( * 1), but I'm finding that it's actually biased against the computer (and therefore unfair to Kurzweil). There's a significant chance that a computer with a breathtaking performance will lose by probability alone.

Look at this rule: The Computer will be deemed to have passed the “Turing Test Human Determination Test” if the Computer has fooled two or more of the three Human Judges into thinking that it is a human.

Suppose the Computer is absolutely perfect its responses (i.e., it should pass the Turing Test). The judges know that they're speaking to 3 humans and 1 computer, so if the judges are chatting with 4 equally-good subjects, they'll decide that one of the four is a computer on a whim. There's a chance that Kurzweil will lose just by arbitrariness.

It's like being asked to sample 4 glasses of wine to pick the worst. Unbeknownst to you, all 4 glasses have the same wine. Even though they're equally good, you'll reject one glass by some arbitrary measure. Maybe you felt an itch on your neck while drinking from the second glass, so that one is the bad wine.

( * 1) http://www.kurzweilai.net/a-wager-on-the-turing-test-the-rul...

computator2• 12 years ago

Can someone please help with the probability calculation?

3 judges and 4 participants

What's the probability that any 2 or all 3 judges will pick a particular participant ("the computer") out of 4 at random?

xmonkee• 12 years ago

all 3 = 1.6% any 2 = 14%

thesteamboat• 12 years ago

Suppose that the participants are all indistinguishable. Each judge has a 3/4 chance of "being fooled". Let p be the event that the computer is correctly determined, and let q be the event that the computer is not selected. We calculate (1/4p+3/4q)^3 = 1/64(p^3 +3p^2(3q) + 3p(3q)^2+(3q)^3) = 1/64 (p^3 + 9p^2q + 27pq^2 + 27q^3). The probability, then, that the computer is chosen by random chance is 10/64 or approximately 15%.

kbenson• 12 years ago

It only has to happen once for Kurzweil to win, so it seems fair to me he has a higher bar. Winning through chance is much less fair than losing through chance in this situation.

falcor84• 12 years ago

From what I understood, the ai would only need to win once. Therefore, after the computer reaches near-human intelligence, it'll be statistically sure to win in a few years. (And given Moore's law, in these few years the ai will continue to significantly improve)

peeters• 12 years ago

I already created a bot that would pass the Turing Test, according to these specifications anyway:

<Josiah, an 8 month old from Nashua, has entered the room>

S: Hi Josiah, I'm Steven. What do you like to do?

J: <no response>

S: Josiah, are you there?

J: <no response for 4 minutes>

J: uhqtuhq a

S: Excuse me?

J: <no response>

lifeformed• 12 years ago

Strong AI confirmed, alert the press.

notahacker2• 12 years ago

In 2002 I negotiated the rules for a Turing test wager with Mitch Kapor on the Long Now website. The question underlying our twenty-thousand-dollar bet... was, “Will the Turing test be passed by a machine by 2029?” I said yes, and Kapor said no. It took us months of dialogue to arrive at the intricate rules to implement our wager.

If this was a sci-fi short, the twist would be "Ray Kurweil" admitting at the end of these negotiations that he was a bot that had borrowed the futurist's email address.

mVChr• 12 years ago

I'm pretty sure I'd be able to detect almost any bot that tries to pass a Turing test. They always seem to try to answer every question. What if you did something like this in rapid succession...

Me: hey Me: hola! Me: que pasa? Me: 'sup?

If the bot/person on the other end tried to respond exactly 4 times that would be a very strong indication that something's amiss. And most likely they would trip up on the slang term at the end.

ascotan• 12 years ago

As I've written chat bots before this is standard stuff that all bots do:

1. regex the input and spit back canned responses: Question: I live in the |||<<capital of the United States>>|||. Do you know where that is? Eugene: Every nerd knows that the |||<<capital of The United States is Washington>>|||.

2. if you get confused spit back out something from the chat history Question I live in the capital of the country that put a man on the moon. Eugene:: Well, if you want it, the |||<<capital of The United States is Washington>>||.

3. if you haven't been able to find a regex pattern match in a while try to derail the conversation. Question: How old were you when you started to wear glasses? Eugene: No I was not! How can you think so?! If I’m not mistaken – |||<<you still didn’t tell me where you live>>||. OR it’s a secret?:-)

In fact this bot is pretty bad. You can tell from the output that it couldn't pattern match virtually any of the inputs and responses 3,7-10 are an attempt to change the topic of the conversation. Responses 4,5 are pattern match misses that are regurgitating from the chat history. Only 1,2,4 are response matches from the parsing engine.

zeidrich• 12 years ago

I could design chat bot that passes itself off as a human using speech to text.

  Interrogator: "Hello, how old are you?"
  Bot: "I'm 2 and a half."
  I: What is your name?
  B: Keegan
  I: I live in the Capital of the United States.
  B: Why?
  I: Because there was a job open and I needed one.
  B: Why?
  I: Because I need money in order to live.
  B: Why?
  I: You know, to buy groceries and stuff.
  B: Why? 
  I: What do you mean?
  B: I like butterflies!
  I: Oh, really? 
  B: Yeah, do you know butterflies come from cappilars?
  I: Yeah, I knew that.
  B: Do you like butterflies?
  I: I guess so.
  B: Why?
  I: They look nice I guess.  
  B: Why?
  I: I don't think you're a person, this is shit.
  B: SHIT!
  I: What?
  B: SHIT!
  I: Stop saying that.
  B: SHIT SHIT SHIT hehehe!
  I: Oh God damn it what did I do?
  B: SHIT SHIT GOD DAMN SHIT HEHEHE!
  I: I gotta go.
  B: OK, bye!
  B: SHIT! SHIT! SHIT!

I take issue with the example given in the article because nobody's going to reply with 2 sentences for every simple question. Likewise, it's bad with memory and reasoning. It should have had some trouble when he said he lived in the capital of the US and the capital of the country that built the great wall, but then again it was obvious that it didn't remember where he lived at all.

At least in my example a 2 year old doesn't care what you're saying. It's able to learn better than the other example, but still not a lot is expected.

I bet there's some cognitive age level that we're able to emulate well enough to pass off as human, at least in terms of verbal communication. I think it would be useful if we were better able to measure that, and raise that level slowly. Maybe we actually can impersonate a 2 year old well, then what about a 3 year old? 4 year old? Where do we get hung up?

If we can't get a 2 year old's cognitive processes down without a doubt, we should build on that first instead of trying to do something more complex without an understanding of how to make the foundations of that intelligence work.

lnanek2• 12 years ago

Wow, did they put any work into that thing at all or just hook up the default chat bots we've had for a decade? It would be pretty trivial to just have it keep track of what it said and never repeat exactly, never ask where someone lives after a location has been mentioned in any way, not call itself a little boy and use correct punctuation, etc..

DonHopkins2• 12 years ago

Ben Shneiderman wrote an interesting essay entitled "Beyond Intelligent Machines: Designing Predictable and Controllable User Interfaces", that explained why he is strongly opposed to suggesting that computers are 'intelligent' or 'smart', and suggested better approaches to human computer interaction.

https://code.google.com/p/micropolis/source/browse/trunk/mic...

He wrote that back in 1992, and I think it's still very relevant now.

Limits to Imagination

I think we should have much greater ambition than to make a computer behave like an intelligent butler or other human agent. Computer supported cooperative work (CSCW), hypertext/hypermedia, multi-media, information visualization, and virtual realities are powerful technologies that enable human users to accomplish tasks that no human has ever done. If we describe computers in human terms then we run the risk of limiting our ambition and creativity in the design of future computer capabilities.

dubcanada• 12 years ago

I found it very easy to tell it was a computer. Way too many emoticons for a real person.

It also seems to have problems with slang.

chaos0• 12 years ago

until an AI can answer this: define something abstract (e.g. emotion, intelligence). and be able to answer follow on questions without sounding like wikipedia, there is no chance the turing test will ever be passed.

andrewla• 12 years ago

In thinking of this as a binary question (pass/fail) it feels like we're missing the point. As Kurzweil points out when quoting himself, "By the time there is a broad consensus that the Turing test has been passed, the actual threshold will have long since been achieved."

What we need is more of a Turing "score". The design would be a website (say) where each human participant will be presented with both "defend your humanity" challenges (as a subject) or "judge other's humanity". For the former, you'll try to convince an interviewer that you are human; for the latter, you'll be presented with two subjects, and asked to identify which is human (possibly with a "both human" or "both robots" option).

Based on this, individuals will get an ELO score (like chess) on how often they "win" the contest as a subject, that is, are identified as human (or as "more likely to be human than their opponent").

Computer programs will participate as subjects; the requirement will be that the behavior is deterministic given a random seed presented (to them only) at the beginning of the conversation,is to prevent cheating and allow reproducibility.

On an orthogonal level, participants acting as judges could be scored on how often they are correct in making the identification; and there's no reason that computer programs could not compete on this side as well. And this could even feed back into the score for humanity; you get more credit for fooling a good judge than fooling a bad judge, etc.

metaphorm• 12 years ago

Good on Kurzweil for calling out a self-aggrandizing researcher at U. of Reading. the Goostman bot is pretty poor as far as chat bots go. utterly typical in capabilities (below average if you ask me) for this type of bot, and utterly unconvincing to non-naive judges.

trhway• 12 years ago

the Turing test is to fool into "believing it is a person". In this case the judges were fooled into "believing it is an Ukranian 13 years boy" (with development disability probably). I think "a person" in the test means at least average IQ and average education/knowledge volume.

tim333• 12 years ago

It's quite interesting to read Turing's original article (A. M. Turing (1950) Computing Machinery and Intelligence. Mind). I don't think he would have been that impressed by Prof Warwick's claims.

http://www.csee.umbc.edu/courses/471/papers/turing.pdf

In fact if you read it, the whole claim that you can call more than 30% of the judges getting a test wrong one time 'passing the Turing test' is rather contrary to what Turing actually was saying.

dragonbonheur• 12 years ago

I notice that in his conversation with the chatbot, Mr Kurzweil himself fails to meet his own criteria for the Turing test. Shouldn't the machine expect the human not to behave like a machine and thus have a sensible conversation?

Response by Ray Kurzweil to chatbot Eugene Goostman “passing the Turing test”

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