

Cheeky - It's Australian for Artificial Intelligence - ColinWright
http://www.theglobalmail.org/mobile/feature/cheeky-its-australian-for-artificial-intelligence/287/

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jgfoot
Salon published in 2003 a great series of articles by John Sundman about the
Loebner Prize. He describes a two-time winner, "ALICE," in a way that doesn't
inspire awe for the creator's programming achievements:

"""Wallace’s theory of A.I. is no theory at all. It’s not that he doesn’t
believe in artificial intelligence, per se; rather, he doesn’t much believe in
intelligence, period. In a way that oddly befits a contest sponsored by a
bunch of Skinnerians, Wallace’s ALICE program is based strictly on a stimulus-
response model. You type something in, if the program recognizes what you
typed, it picks a clever, appropriate, “canned” answer. ... There is no
representation of knowledge, no common-sense reasoning, no inference engine to
mimic human thought. Just a very long list of canned answers, from which it
picks the best option. Basically, it’s Eliza on steroids. ... And this
strategy works, Wallace says, because that’s what people are: mindless robots
who don’t listen to each other but merely regurgitate canned answers."""

<http://www.salon.com/2003/02/26/loebner_part_one/>

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AsylumWarden
I am by no means as smart as these people but I did recently made this
observation myself while visiting Google+. I try to avoid political
discussions but someone always finds a way to insert them. This time, as I
glanced over one such discussion it made me realize... People don't think,
they just repeat things that have been told to them, fact or not, as long as
it sounds like a good fit. No one involved in these discussions is going to
convince the other to change their mind. AIs should be this easy!

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underwater
That is very true. Most of what I say is phrasing or idioms I've unconciously
absorbed. However I obviously don't randomly repeat anything I hear. The
things that I absorb are ideas that resonate with my existing world view,
which has been crafted by original thought over a much longer time. So behind
those memes and tired phrasing in the arguments you heard there is porbably a
kernel of unique thought.

This is why I prefer online forums and other forms of asynchronous
communication over face to face debates. The former allows me to form an
opinion - which can often change as I try to articulate myself. The later
relies on my initial reaction, which is always much less refined.

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archangel_one
I think it's a bit unfair to say he cheated. He didn't break any rules, even
if his program wasn't really in the previous spirit of the competition - but
it also sounds like they needed a bit of shaking up anyway.

From the Loebner Prize page: "The winner of the annual contest is the best
entry relative to other entries that year, irrespective of how good it is in
an absolute sense". Sounds like his entry certainly was deserving of the
annual contest, even if it's not a general AI solution.

~~~
jdp23
Personally, I would agree with you.

But Hutchens' own paper was called "How to Win the Turing Prize By Cheating"
-- <http://www.csee.umbc.edu/471/papers/hutchens.pdf> \-- so I guess
reasonable minds differ.

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smarsh
It's just his light-hearted way of calling out the Turing test, I think.

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kokey
To me the Loebner prize does a lot more to teach us about humans than about
how to create AI. The success of ALICE showed us how much of our conversation
is just based on regurgitating canned answers based on queues, just look at
how drunk people converse. HeX showed us how much we think we communicate when
we're just exchanging banter.

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jawns
This horizontal scrolling thing is a real bomb.

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quacker
Isn't it? I was briefly using all of the space on my widescreen display while
browsing. Certainly an improvement over vertically-scrolled websites where
margins are often just blank space.

It looks like you still get vertical scrolling on mobile.

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tjoff
Why oh why do you browse with your browser maximized?

I could have viewed this page maximized and just about read the whole thing
without scrolling at all, but how would that be preferable?

You might fit more text on the screen but you don't read the whole thing in
parallel, you slowly read paragraph after paragraph and what you gain in not
having to scroll you loose in having to move your eyes and head instead,
running maximized you just _waste_ screen real estate.

I would have expected for this implementation to break down with different
browser sizes but it reflowed well and seems to be well thought out. But I'm
very skeptical towards such a radical change unless there is a real benefit to
it. The benefit in this case is that you get reasonably sized columns (that
are easy to read), which is kind of hard to achieve with vertical scrolling (I
haven't seen a single implementation that works nearly as well as this one).

So I applaud their efforts, but there should be a manual fallback (couldn't
find one), because I'm confident that it doesn't work as intended everywhere.

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jaems33
"Why oh why do you browse with your browser maximized?"

Because white space is great.

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droithomme
The article does use the word "cheat" and the winner himself said he cheated
and hacked, but actually he didn't cheat at all.

Cheating would be using a human to generate the responses and pretend it is a
computer.

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denysonique
Reading the page with zoom is impossible, the page is inaccessible to me.

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lifthrasiir
Jason Hutchens wrote a paper about his winning entry (linked in the OP), which
is just as interesting as the OP. The relevant discussion starts from Chapter
7.

[http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/courses/mindsandmachines/...](http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/courses/mindsandmachines/Papers/hutchens96how.pdf)

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sp332
Chris McKinstry was also fed up with the Loebner Prize, but instead of making
a chat bot to break it, he invented a less subjective intelligence test, the
Minimum Intelligent Signal Test (MIST)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_Intelligent_Signal_Tes...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_Intelligent_Signal_Test)

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BruceIV
It accords with my (disappointing) impression from my undergrad AI class, that
while these systems are certainly "artificial", the "intelligence" tends to
lie completely with their designers.

