

Ask HN: Could you pass a turing test in a foreign language? - itry

Im currently doing a Hollywood consulting gig for the production of an upcomming science fiction movie.<p>One interesting question came up today: Could a human manage to pass a turing test in a foreign language?<p>Imagine you would have to convince somebody that you are human. And the test is done in chinese. Could you?<p>What if the alphabet was binary? What would your answer to "1" be? How many digits would you need to prove you are human?
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tjr
If the human knows the foreign language, then sure. If not, then I'm not
certain you would get any results that make enough sense to deem it a pass or
a failure. (And the computer almost certainly would not be programmed to
respond to unexpected language input either.)

"1" by itself isn't a question. Neither a human nor a computer could usefully
answer "1" without being told the context in some way. A human might tell you
this over the Turing test teletype, but so might a computer! If the question
is stupid or senseless, I don't think you're going to get useful results.

One possible twist with "1" could be some sort of pattern recognition, which
could arguably be evidence in favor of intelligence, but I don't think that
was really the intent of the Turing test.

In any case, if you as the interrogator violate the expectations of the Turing
test, you could very likely brute-force your way into determining which
candidate was human and which was a computer, but I think that violates the
spirit of the test.

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tokenadult
我会用中国话通过图灵测试。

