
By 2029 no computer will have passed the Turing Test - dmitriy_ko
http://longbets.org/1/
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dws
By 2029, and increasing number of humans will fail the Turing Test.

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yalimkgerger
this is just brilliant. i just had to write a comment to appreciate.

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majmun
I haven't yet seen bot that could answer question about specific setting that
you are in when talking to it. for example if i ask bot to repeat what i ask
it just before this. it can't tell. because bots like cleverbot operates by
crowdsourcing answers and than parroting it randomly. Also when i ask it same
question multiple times I get different answers. Maybe bots should store
procedures in their database and not just crowdsourced answers. and keep
context of current session. or something.

They maybe passed the turing test But that just convinced me that Turing test
really means nothing. You can't really determine anything for sure with turing
test but only probability. (many humans acts or are stupid, if machine is
stupid some may decide that machine is like human)

What i would like to see more instead of machine passing turing test is
building machine species that could survive in nature, if it can survive
autonomously like some kind of animal than this machine species could be said
to be intelligent.

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montecarl
Lets assume that humans are complex molecular machines. That is our bodies
obey the laws of physics and are made of atoms that behave in predictable
ways.

If we know what we are made of (the molecules and how they are arranged) and
how these molecules can be modeled (i.e. quantum mechanics) then it is only a
matter of time until an entire human can be modeled on a computer. Once you
can model the entire body, then you can have a computer that can pass the
Turing test, because it more or less is human.

If humans can be modeled as deterministic systems that follow physical laws,
then computers will simulate them at some point in the future.

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grannyg00se
There are two problems that I can see here.

First, the complexity in the physics/chemistry of our molecular machines is
such that "only a matter of time" may extend longer than the time span of our
species' existence.

Second, it is completely possibly that we are more than molecular machines.
There may be an aspect to our functioning that is beyond the physical. That
aspect of our existence may not be possible to replicate.

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baddox
> There may be an aspect to our functioning that is beyond the physical. That
> aspect of our existence may not be possible to replicate.

What does "beyond the physical" even mean? I assume you mean something
"supernatural," meaning something that is "true/real," yet impossible to study
or even verify empirically.

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grannyg00se
Beyond the physical meaning properties that are unable to be replicated by
manipulating physical atoms and molecules. I wouldn't call them "supernatural"
at all because (assuming they do exist) they are absolutely a natural and even
necessary part of life.

I would assume they would be possible to verify in some way once we've reached
the stage where hard AI is nearly achieved.

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baddox
You imply that atoms and molecules are elementary particles, which we already
know to not be the case. It's possible that quantum effects, which seem to be
probabilistic (depending on your interpretation), are vital for human
intelligence. However, that seems fairly unlikely. While it's still mostly
speculation, most experts tend to think that classical mechanics are
sufficient to explain the functions of the human brain, which would imply that
an identical arrangement of atoms/molecules would also be an intelligent
system, and a good computer simulation (which is currently still unfeasible)
of the atoms/molecules would also be an intelligent system.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mind>

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grannyg00se
How could molecules and atoms both be elementary particles? I'm making no such
implication. Nor did I mention anything about quantum effects.

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burgerbrain
The problem here is that you are being so vague that your comment can really
only be understood if actually are talking about something 'supernatural'.

Biology is really not much more than a self-replicating subset of chemistry.
Without evidence to suggest something sort of psuedo-supernatural difference
between the simplest of single cell organisms and homo sapiens, I think the
only reasonable position is that whatever it is that "preforms" intelligence
falls under the realm of the physical sciences.

Until we acquire evidence to suggest otherwise, it is silly to assume anything
else.

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grannyg00se
I agree, that is a very reasonable position. But we are still a long way from
proving the position. And until the position has been demonstrated true, then
there is room for speculation. Which is what longbets is all about.

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burgerbrain
The burden of proof is definitely on anybody asserting that intelligence isn't
a physical phenomenon. We have no evidence to suggest that it isn't, but a
hell of a lot to suggest that it is.

Longbets is fine, but such unfounded speculation doesn't have much use in
serious conversation.

 _"proving the position proving the position"_

It seems like you might be misunderstanding the role of science.

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unimpressive
Theres far more interesting implications for humanity riding on this bet than
twenty thousand dollars going to charity.

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zitterbewegung
That is assuming the Turing test is a good test for intelligence.

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kruhft
Cleverbot, supposedly has passed the Turing test. I have my doubts, but there
is something to say about this Internet accomplishment. There will always be
doubt about passing this test as it is not mathematical proof, which is
probably why Turing proposed it.

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batista
_Cleverbot, supposedly has passed the Turing test._

I seriously doubt it. Here's a conversation I just had with it:

Me: What's your name?

CB: My name?

Me: Yes.

CB: What's your name?

Me: Suzan.

CB: Nope.

Me: Nope what?

CB: Nope, allessander is not my name.

This is sub-Eliza quality...

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unimpressive
The version brought to the test had more computing power for the one
conversation, and other tune-ups IIRC.

EDIT: <http://cleverbot.com/human>

"Cleverbot was given more processing power for this test than it can be
online. It had two dedicated, fast computers with solid state drives while
talking to just 1 or 2 people at once. Online there are often 1000 people
talking to each machine. We know you'd all love to talk to it the powerful
version, but we need a lot more servers first! "

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Jach
Thanks for the link. I had similar thoughts to the original downvoted
commenter. I talked to one of the various IM bots in 2006, and they've been
around a lot longer than that, and I thought that apart from its constant
advertising to me it was remarkably human-like especially when it sometimes
used 'u' instead of 'you'. If it had more processing power and memory, a
better memory, and didn't have a goal of making money through advertising, I
thought back then it had a decent chance at fooling humans.

That's all the Turing Test is, it's fooling humans, and humans are incredibly
easy to fool--you don't need human level intelligence to fool one. Just
several months ago I only realized that a response I got on a craigslist
posting was made by a bot after I replied and it replied back with an almost
word-for-word copy of its original message (and urged me to fill out a form of
personal info). Simple hacks like avoiding repeating the same things,
remembering information shared to whom and to you from whom, and the
occasional intentional grammatical error go a long way to trick the human. I
think we could have had multiple Turing Test passes over the past couple years
if that was actually an important goal. But I think most people in AI realize
there are more interesting problems to work on than AI PR so projects like
CleverBot aren't given top priority.

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wololo
Andrew Ng's work is pretty neat: <http://youtube.com/watch?v=ZmNOAtZIgIk>

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jhuni
Why would a computer pass the turing test? We haven't made much progress in
building intelligent machines since the late AI winter.

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baddox
Using any functional, practical definition of "artificial intelligence" that
I've ever heard, we have certainly made a lot of progress since the late AI
winter.

It sounds like you're using the unfortunate definition that essentially
defines any task as "not requiring intelligence" the instant a machine is able
to perform it well. This has been done with voice recognition, facial
recognition, music composition, etc., and is actually one of the main reasons
we even had the AI winter.

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Dylan16807
I don't think that's a very good argument. Okay, so let's say we used to think
it took intelligence to recognize voice/face. Then we figured out a way to do
it! Oh man, intelligence, right? Well, no. We realized that you can stick the
voice through a spectrograph and measure the peaks, that's certainly not
intelligence. And that you can detect the edges of bits of faces pretty easily
and then compare various ratios for similarity. That's clever on the part of
the algorithm designers but nothing intellect-related.

I've never heard anyone say that music requires intelligence. Creativity
maybe. But I can make a very simple program that has a bunch of hard-coded
music patterns that it picks from and nests randomly. It can 'creatively'
output trillions of different songs and clearly has nothing even approaching
intelligence.

Intelligence is not about what an algorithm can mechanically do. It's about
comprehensive world-modeling that can predict and communicate with other
agents. If something can be coded in a month by a grad student to run on an
8086 then I feel comfortable saying it's not AI.

Edit: added the word mechanically to be clearer

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glenra
When it comes to face/voice recognition, what makes you think people are doing
anything more clever? Our brains seem to have edge and shape detection modules
too, do they not? Is it _not knowing the algorithm_ that makes what we do seem
"intelligent?

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Dylan16807
There seems to be a miscommunication here. I don't think people _are_ doing
anything particularly clever with regards to facial recognition. I think
_intelligence_ is based on complex, abstract, general reasoning. Physical
object recognition is a useful input filter but not evidence of intellect.

It's not knowing the algorithm at all. I'm just pretty sure that the algorithm
for intelligence is more complex/further from our knowledge than a
contemporary grad student could do. I'd _love_ to be proven wrong by a PhD
thesis with attached AI.

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iRobot
But I already have, human dudes

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batista
Despite being so clever, _Ray Kurzweil_ is also an obsessed idiot on the topic
of AI and the Singularity.

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md224
While I wouldn't go so far as to call him an "idiot," I do think he should be
shifting his focus towards emergent phenomena on the Internet rather than a
single silicon mind in a box. He's stuck in a 20th century perspective.

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FollowSteph3
We also have to remember that the Turing test isn't a real measure of
intelligence. After all a computer following rules is NOT any more intelligent
than the rules themselves.

For example, if someone gave me a ton of rules on how to convert sentences
from English to another language, and the output was amazing, would that mean
I'm intelligent? Not likely, just that I can follow the language conversion
rules.

I think the issue is that too much emphasis is being put on Turing tests as a
measure of intelligence when in fact it's really more a measure of how well a
computer can follow conversations and social norms. Just because you can fool
a real person, doesn't mean you're intelligently interacting with that person.
Just like if I can fool another person I can speak another language by
following translation rules, it doesn't actually mean I can speak the other
language at all!

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baddox
I disagree with your conclusion that such a system is inherently not
intelligent.

If you accept that humans are intelligent, and that they can judge that
another human is intelligent by conversing with them across a text-only
channel, then you run into a big problem by stating that a Turing-test-passing
algorithm is unintelligent. To do so would expose the fact that your
definition of "intelligence" secretly includes the class "...and is a human,"
which makes "intelligent machine" a contradiction of terms. It is essentially
an example of the No True Scotsman fallacy, because you're revealing a new
facet of your claim when faced with an apparent counterexample.

If you're _defining_ "intelligence" to be a purely human trait, then come
right out and say so, and everyone will agree that on your terms a machine
cannot be intelligent. Of course, I would argue that such a definition isn't
very useful, since it basically means that the adjectives "intelligent" and
"humans" are synonyms.

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grannyg00se
"If you accept that humans are intelligent, and that they can judge that
another human is intelligent by conversing with them across a text-only
channel, then you run into a big problem by stating that a Turing-test-passing
algorithm is unintelligent. "

I would say that passing the Turing test is a necessary but insufficient
measure of complete human intelligence. It would be astounding, and a major
feat in the field, but there must be more to the definition of human intellect
than simply carrying on a text conversation.

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baddox
If humans can't recognize intelligence, then we won't be able come up with
some other test to recognize intelligence.

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grannyg00se
Agreed. But we'd have to agree on what standard of intelligence we're
considering. Turing is only one standard. And I would say not a very high one
if being compared to human intelligence.

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burgerbrain
Eh.. The Turing _test_ ( _Turing_ was a man, and the Turing test is a concept
posed by him) is restricted in the way that it is to eliminate irrelevant
factors such as robotics.

The concept itself that is presented is quite sound: If you cannot tell that
it's not intelligent, how can you say that it is not?

I cannot think of a better test. The only weak point as I see it does not say
anything one way or the other about intelligence that is fundamentally
different from our own (for example: doesn't happen to use natural language).

