
The “One question” riddle - mitenmit
Imagine you are in an online chat room with certain number of agents. There are some human agents and possibly some AI agents (trying to pretend they are human).<p>If you can ask only one question to figure out how many AI agents are in the room(if any), what that question would be in order to be viable for longest possible time in the years to come?<p>P.S. 
 1. The human agents are willing to cooperate you and will try to answer your question, so if no answer is received you may consider that agent for AI. 
 2. The AI agents have internet access and can use every online resource available.
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jaybosamiya
I like this one:

What is the following rhyme about?

Thirty days has September,

April, June and no wonder,

All the rest have peanut butter,

Except my grandmother who has a little red tricycle.

A. Family relationships B. Calendar C. Food D. Exercise

source:
[http://www.britell.com/misc/turing.html](http://www.britell.com/misc/turing.html)

Not sure how long it'd stay viable though.

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imglorp
That was an interesting list in terms of all the meta analysis that went into
it. But of all the items in the list, I think this calendar one would fare the
worst against a Watson style AI, who would have a ranking system for
recognizing topics and culture. The well known calendar rhyme would be a
partial match, plus half the words in the rhyme are about calendars. The other
topics would be poor matches for food, family, etc, only hitting once each.

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kleer001
Why only one question? Academic curiosity or are you an actual Artificial
Intelligence from the future come back to help protect your younger self? Is
this an agent of Roko's Basilisk?

[http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/bitwise/2014/07/rok...](http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/bitwise/2014/07/roko_s_basilisk_the_most_terrifying_thought_experiment_of_all_time.html)

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mitenmit
Let's say Academic curiosity and also a lot of questions may annoy the other
human agents.

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kleer001
Well, I think Academic curiosity should be quenched by the lovely link from
jaybosamiya.

I however have more practical thoughts. "A lot" is understandable. If you're
trying to suss out a bot without alerting or annoying others I think a fancy
convoluted question will kind of give you away. Also I think a clever bot (not
even AI) would just sidestep weird or out of context questions. Restricting
the queries to a chat room hamstrings one's attempts, but that's the basis of
classic Turing tests.

But here's the rub. Why do we assume the agent in question is going to answer
our questions Naively (sincerely and to the best of their ability) unless
they're in a testing context? Isn't that what is required?

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mitenmit
I was imagining the context of an online poker room where AI agent pretending
to be a human will be unwanted from the other human players since an AI that
can win poker games is already here. But the human players are there to play
poker not to inspect for bots so they need for quick way to get an idea what's
the deal with the bots around :)

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kleer001
Ah, ok.

Then in that particular context I predict it will be nearly impossible to tell
the well written bots from quiet and/or anti social persons.

Reasons given above in my previous comment. Namely the bot is under no
pressure to answer questions naively and to the fullest of its ability.

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logn
I'd ask: Does the name Pavlov ring a bell?

Or something similar to this. I think AI will have difficulty with humor and
sarcasm for a long time.

