I just stumbled across a site mentioning the Turing test, I'd never heard of it before and found it quite interesting
I'm sure that a lot of ATSer's will already know about it but for the benefit of those who like me didn't it goes as follows
Turing Test is meant to determine if a computer program has intelligence. Quoting Turing, the original imitation game can be described as follows:
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 from 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.
When talking about the Turing Test today what is generally understood is the following: The interrogator is connected to one person and one machine
via a terminal, therefore can't see her counterparts. Her task is to find out which of the two candidates is the machine, and which is the human only
by asking them questions. If the machine can "fool" the interrogator, it is intelligent.
This test has been subject to different kinds of criticism and has been at the heart of many discussions in AI, philosophy and cognitive science for
the past 50 years.
also through this site I found some links to some computers that you can talk with
first I talked to Fred, but he was quite hard work sometimes
robitron.dynip.com...
and then I talked to jabberwock, and actually had quite an interesting conversation
www.abenteuermedien.de...
These computers can be quite convincing at times, and with some computers learning from the conversations that they have with us, I wonder how long it
will be before one can successfully manage to pass the Turing test, and what it would mean for the future. Who knows perhaps one day we will find
computers posting on ATS!
