Computer Successfully Beats the Turing Test

CommanderFrank

CommanderFrank

Cat Can't Scratch It
Joined
May 9, 2000
Messages
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For the very first time ever, a computer, posing as 13 year old Eugene Goostman, successfully fooled 33% of an audience that it was in fact, sentient. This is the first time a computer has passed the Turing test. Skynet is just around the corner. We're all going to die :D

This is undeniably a significant announcement and features very impressive work from the developers but this computer is a long way from becoming self aware, hacking all of the world’s systems and building an army of robots.
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Today's 13 year olds are pretty dumb though, and barely sentient themselves.
 
In any case, its going to be hard to be a Catholic priest now if the FBI can flood the internet with millions of bots pretending to be 13 year old boys.
 
Ducman69 said:
Today's 13 year olds are pretty dumb though, and barely sentient themselves.
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Possibly, but really I took it as more of at least 33% of the population are retarded and easily fooled.

Glass half full/empty I suppose. Too many years doing It support, I'm beyond cynical when it comes to the average persons lack of intelligence.
 
Although the Turing test will certainly improve the performance of text parsers I think its value as a measure of awareness has diminished ... a truly self aware machine needs more than the ability to answer a few questions (regardless of how difficult that has proven to be) ... it must learn, it must pose its own questions, and ultimately be beyond our control (since what truly self aware entity chooses to be a slave) ... we are a long way from that yet ;)
 
Dekoth-E- said:
I took it as more of at least 33% of the population are retarded and easily fooled.

Glass half full/empty I suppose. Too many years doing It support, I'm beyond cynical when it comes to the average persons lack of intelligence.
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I thought the exact same.
 
Quote:
This is undeniably a significant announcement and features very impressive work from the developers but this computer is a long way from becoming self aware, hacking all of the world’s systems and building an army of robots.
Xxxxxxx

And that is exactly what a diabolical self aware computer would want us to think. Quick, reformat and load windows ME on it.
 
kbrickley said:
Although the Turing test will certainly improve the performance of text parsers I think its value as a measure of awareness has diminished ... a truly self aware machine needs more than the ability to answer a few questions (regardless of how difficult that has proven to be) ... it must learn, it must pose its own questions, and ultimately be beyond our control (since what truly self aware entity chooses to be a slave) ... we are a long way from that yet ;)
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A machine that can pass the Turning test would do those things. One of the points of the Turing test was showing how ill-defined the concept of 'thinking' really is. The idea is just as meaningful today: If I can make an AI that can impersonate a regular person... what exactly is the difference?

You can tell me what you think and experience, and you believe you can create original questions and ideas, but unless there's magic involved there must be some physical explanation for how our thoughts arise. I suspect our thoughts and actions are ultimately just as formulaic as any chat bot, we just can't 'see' the complex underlying decision-making circuitry in our brains as easily as we can with the chat bot.
 
Dekoth-E- said:
Possibly, but really I took it as more of at least 33% of the population are retarded and easily fooled.

Glass half full/empty I suppose. Too many years doing It support, I'm beyond cynical when it comes to the average persons lack of intelligence.
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Program the computer to not DWI and not text while driving...it is automatically smarter than at least 33% of humans.
 
.....I don't get it?

How is this measured? What was the test exactly?

Was it simply words on a screen? How the hell is that an indication of a real test?

I mean christ, far as you know I could be a bot who regularly types out responses
 
DeathFromBelow said:
The idea is just as meaningful today: If I can make an AI that can impersonate a regular person... what exactly is the difference?
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Its actually a bit stupid, as with enough programming, you could simply program an answer for the overwhelming majority of questions or statements an average person could make in 5 minutes.

The problem is that all its really doing is brute strength answering if X then Y and has no intelligence outside of its very basic response programming.

By definition, its not actually thinking, its more like "instinct" where it responds in a certain 100% predictable way to a stimuli. Give it a slightly different stimuli than its used to, and it has no response. Its thus incapable of creativity, imagination, etc.

Basically, think of it as a real IT guy problem solving, versus a script monkey in India with no clue what the hell is going on and just reading off a script and spitting out a response based on your input to questions on a flowchart.
 
DeathFromBelow said:
A machine that can pass the Turning test would do those things. One of the points of the Turing test was showing how ill-defined the concept of 'thinking' really is. The idea is just as meaningful today: If I can make an AI that can impersonate a regular person... what exactly is the difference?

You can tell me what you think and experience, and you believe you can create original questions and ideas, but unless there's magic involved there must be some physical explanation for how our thoughts arise. I suspect our thoughts and actions are ultimately just as formulaic as any chat bot, we just can't 'see' the complex underlying decision-making circuitry in our brains as easily as we can with the chat bot.
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I think that is the danger of the Turing Test ... it is about mimicry and not true intelligence ... the ability to create original thoughts or to make jumps in logic are not part of the Turing mimicry (and they would be integral to true AI) ... also, as others have mentioned this test might reflect more on the lack of intelligence of the audience as opposed to the abilities of the machine ...

I agree with you that human intelligence is mechanical, chemical, and electrical in nature (and not divine) but we don't fully understand the mechanics of this yet ... we can try to create a machine designed to mimic our behaviors but without understanding how we learn and why our brain does the amazing things it can do it will be difficult to make a machine that equals or exceeds us

We are also not philosophically ready to deal with AI yet anyway ... if we were by some chance able to create a truly artificial living intelligence what rights would it have ... if we turn it off is it murder ... if we make it a servant is it a slave ... hopefully it will be many centuries more before we encounter true AI so that we can be properly prepared with how to deal with it
 
Ducman69 said:
Today's 13 year olds are pretty dumb though, and barely sentient themselves.
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Dang, you beat me to it!
Have a couple of 12-13 year old nephews; both dumber than sh*t. You can't even carry on an intelligent conversation with them. Product of today's public school system.
 
Dr. Righteous said:
Dang, you beat me to it!
Have a couple of 12-13 year old nephews; both dumber than sh*t. You can't even carry on an intelligent conversation with them. Product of today's public school system.
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or parents...


Stuff like this scares me. I don't want any progress till we have proof that there are safeguards in place.
 
Didn't a famous thinker once say that a model for intelligence is no more apt to be truly intelligent than a model for weather will produce rain?
 
kbrickley said:
Actually it is probably more like 60% but 27% of the people were so far down the curve they couldn't even find the test location :p
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“Just think of how stupid the average person is, and then realize half of them are even stupider!” - My favorite George Carlin quote.
 
Ducman69 said:
Today's 13 year olds are pretty dumb though, and barely sentient themselves.
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It's a bigger problem when many adults are too idiotic and shortsighted to realize that nothing has changed between "yesterday's" 13 year old children and "today's" 13 year old children and are using the same "things are going down the drain" comments that were tossed out at every upcoming generation. Recall that just before World War II started, clueless older people were rambling about how the younger people that would shortly be involved in waging war, were a worthless generation of lazy people that only cared about cars and music were later lauded as the "Greatest Generation" after they protected the interests of their respective nations in armed conflict.

All you and a few others are doing is continuing to prove that adults are too eager to slob off on the responsibility of raising children and helping them grow and develop when they quickly find and point at any easy target they can find instead of thinking more lucidly about normal child development. Children are not adults, but they will eventually turn into a mixture of intelligent or stupid people, of motivated and lazy people, of successful and downtrodden, of worthwhile and worthless people just as every previous generation has and in the same approximate percentages of distribution as the last one and the many before them.
 
CreepyUncleGoogle said:
It's a bigger problem when many adults are too idiotic and shortsighted to realize that nothing has changed between "yesterday's" 13 year old children and "today's" 13 year old children and are using the same "things are going down the drain" comments that were tossed out at every upcoming generation.
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Each consecutive generation's youngsters do have less and less responsibilities. My dad was flying solo in Florida at age 14 for example, whereas these days kids can't even play dodgeball because of the risk of injury. Average IQs are also steadily dropping:
http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/the-sid...qs-dropped-14-points-over-last-180634194.html
As UPI notes, previous research studies have found that women of higher intelligence tend to have fewer children on average, meaning that population growth may be driven by those with a lower IQ. And over time, the abundance of less intelligent offspring would affect the overall IQ average.

On average, the general intelligence of those populations measured dropped by 1.23 points per decade.
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Idiocracy bro. ;)
 
Ducman69 said:
Each consecutive generation's youngsters do have less and less responsibilities. My dad was flying solo in Florida at age 14 for example, whereas these days kids can't even play dodgeball because of the risk of injury. Average IQs are also steadily dropping:
http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/the-sid...qs-dropped-14-points-over-last-180634194.html

Idiocracy bro. ;)
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The change in roles of children in a family simply outlines the transition of a nation through various stages of population growth. As we've progressed rapidly from a lesser stage where children were given roles and responsibilities as laborers within the family unit to a stage wherein children are expected to be in educational institutions and are therefore unavailable as a labor force (which has implications related to population growth slowdown not central to this discussion, but relevant in a halo sense) societal expectations slowly change as well.

Tying this back into your example, even though educational roles were firmly established by the time your father was attending school, societal norms had not yet caught up which may have caused your father's parents to feel it was within the norm to have him doing something that's considered unusual today. I think that ties back into shift away from the assignment of responsibility to children not related to education and simply becoming adults. That shift doesn't automatically mean that child raised within the scope of today's norms (that you appear to object to as you were normalized during a time period when they were slightly different) won't fit within a set of roles and expectations outlined today.

As for IQ, it's a pretty unreliable measure of human intelligence. There are a lot of variables and while perhaps children aren't scoring as well on that particular test, that won't demonstrate a meaningful decline in the quality of individuals as they grow to fill their adult roles. Were human observations about the next generation really true, civilization would have fallen apart a long time ago. Progression and the spark of invention would have long since vanished and learning would have stopped as every generation, as it ages, grumbles about the things seemingly lacking in the upcoming ones.

I know it's hard to rationally downplay your own individual importance in the world, to admit that it's possible for others to be just as significant, and to escape the tendency for a brain to categorize things as more or less or better and worse based on a person's age alone as a measurement, but the record you're playing really is broken. It's time to lift the needle and start thinking rationally rather than emotionally. Don't let it continue to skip and play back the same tired line that has been uttered for countless thousands of years. Be smart and stop the buck with you.
 
CreepyUncleGoogle said:
Progression and the spark of invention would have long since vanished and learning would have stopped as every generation, as it ages, grumbles about the things seemingly lacking in the upcoming ones.
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An imensely small portion of the population is responsible for the advancement of technological development and scientific understanding, and just as global warming doesn't indicate that its unusually hot everywhere in the world, the dumbing down of the general population doesn't mean that we don't have plenty of smart people advancing society... it just means there are less smart people per capita. ;)
 
Ducman69 said:
An imensely small portion of the population is responsible for the advancement of technological development and scientific understanding, and just as global warming doesn't indicate that its unusually hot everywhere in the world, the dumbing down of the general population doesn't mean that we don't have plenty of smart people advancing society... it just means there are less smart people per capita. ;)
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And that the gap between the highest and lowest might be increasing (just as it does on the economics front) ... My worry is we are becoming an upside down bell curve for everything (politics, economics, intelligence,etc) ... lots of folks at extremes and nothing in the middle ;)
 
Ducman69 said:
An imensely small portion of the population is responsible for the advancement of technological development and scientific understanding, and just as global warming doesn't indicate that its unusually hot everywhere in the world, the dumbing down of the general population doesn't mean that we don't have plenty of smart people advancing society... it just means there are less smart people per capita. ;)
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There isn't a general dumbing down. Humans are equally as stupid as they've always been and the state of human nature isn't vastly different than it was five, fifty, or five hundred years ago. There's no supporting evidence to support a claim like that and there isn't a per capita measure of people that significantly advance humanity's state as those people that are in a position to do so aren't there by intelligence alone. Numerous other factors, some seemingly random and the whim of luck or fate alone, placed them in a position to make a vast, positive difference.

And at any rate, you and I both know humans are still human. Since this is an online forum, I realize you need to stick to your initial knee-jerk statement made partly to be funny that I singled out as absurdly narrow minded and defend it to the point where we get distracted and do something else (or one of us gets irate and pokes the ignore button after a bunch of silly name-calling that skirts the edge of forum rules) so that you don't feel like you're made to look silly by a 12 year old troll with nothing better to do than make old men feel a little uncomfortable when they speak out about their views, but I think that you get the point and I hope that you don't make silly claims like that in real life if you happen to be responsible for the actual growth and development of a child.
 
I thought the turing test was a 100 mile ride out in the desert for automated cars. Guess that is something else.
 
Out of curiosity, when they administer this test do the recipients know what's going on? That there could be a computer on the other end? Because going by the way people text nowadays, it's actually surprising only 33% saw it as a 13 year old boy.
 
CreepyUncleGoogle said:
There isn't a general dumbing down. Humans are equally as stupid as they've always been and the state of human nature isn't vastly different than it was five, fifty, or five hundred years ago. There's no supporting evidence to support a claim like that and there isn't a per capita measure of people that significantly advance humanity's state as those people that are in a position to do so aren't there by intelligence alone. Numerous other factors, some seemingly random and the whim of luck or fate alone, placed them in a position to make a vast, positive difference.

And at any rate, you and I both know humans are still human. Since this is an online forum, I realize you need to stick to your initial knee-jerk statement made partly to be funny that I singled out as absurdly narrow minded and defend it to the point where we get distracted and do something else (or one of us gets irate and pokes the ignore button after a bunch of silly name-calling that skirts the edge of forum rules) so that you don't feel like you're made to look silly by a 12 year old troll with nothing better to do than make old men feel a little uncomfortable when they speak out about their views, but I think that you get the point and I hope that you don't make silly claims like that in real life if you happen to be responsible for the actual growth and development of a child.
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I'm not so sure about that first part. I think Idiocracy pretty much nailed it with respect to the intelligent people postponing child bearing until they were secure financially/emotionally (which resulted in it already being too late for them) and the not-so-intelligent people reproducing like crazy. Combined with advances in modern medicine, we now have the potential for a lot more of the population that might have weeded itself out in the past (Darwin award winners and the like) to not only survive, but to procreate as well.

I think it is a correct assumption that people have the same range of potential intelligence and/or wisdom (sort of like Dungeons and Dragons stats really - they've pretty much always been between 3 and 18) as a species, but that does not extrapolate to people actually having the same IQ distribution from generation to generation. We also have computers to thank for a lot of things, not the least of which is that we no longer have to remember a lot of information ourselves, we simply need to remember how to Google it. This was not as easy back in the days when you had to go to your local public library and figure out how to use the card catalog.

As far as computer sentience is concerned, I will believe that we have reached that point when I can ask a computer what its favorite color is and have it give me a response that was not pre-programmed into an answer bank. There is a lot of potential in the type of research that is being done into AI, especially if any of it translates to a better understanding of how animal thought works. As with most technology, however, there is also the potential for it to be used in nefarious ways. Let's just hope the good guys come out on top, but it might not be a bad idea to be ready to welcome our robot overlords if/when the time comes.
 
Color me unimpressed. I'm sure they could have improved the % if they had designed a program to mimic an 8 year old too. So what? Most adults think 13 year old children are stupid, and have probably run into a few, so they give the program a wide margin. I'll be that had the testers been other 13 year olds they would have seen through it more easily, especially if they were from the same geographic area.

Wake me when they have one at an adult level that can fool more than 50% of adults.

This should be a nice long sleep.
 
Education free individuals are reproducing like rabbits... if you only manage to fool 33% with where our population is headed you pretty much exploded on the launch pad.
 
Did someone reboot the server? CreepyUncleGoogle is starting to kind of make some sense again.
 
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