the problem with the turing test
Friday, March 3, 2006, 04:32 PM - Theory, Robots
In The New Atlantis, Mark Halpern points out a bug in Turing's test: humans don't judge the intelligence of other humans by their response to questions but by their appearence.
In the October 1950 issue of the British quarterly Mind, Alan Turing published a 28-page paper titled “Computing Machinery and Intelligence.” It was recognized almost instantly as a landmark. In 1956, less than six years after its publication in a small periodical read almost exclusively by academic philosophers, it was reprinted in The World of Mathematics, an anthology of writings on the classic problems and themes of mathematics and logic, most of them written by the greatest mathematicians and logicians of all time. (In an act that presaged much of the confusion that followed regarding what Turing really said, James Newman, editor of the anthology, silently re-titled the paper “Can a Machine Think?”) Since then, it has become one of the most reprinted, cited, quoted, misquoted, paraphrased, alluded to, and generally referenced philosophical papers ever published. It has influenced a wide range of intellectual disciplines—artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, epistemology, philosophy of mind—and helped shape public understanding, such as it is, of the limits and possibilities of non-human, man-made, artificial “intelligence.”
Turing’s paper claimed that suitably programmed digital computers would be generally accepted as thinking by around the year 2000, achieving that status by successfully responding to human questions in a human-like way. In preparing his readers to accept this idea, he explained what a digital computer is, presenting it as a special case of the “discrete state machine”; he offered a capsule explanation of what “programming” such a machine means; and he refuted—at least to his own satisfaction—nine arguments against his thesis that such a machine could be said to think. (All this groundwork was needed in 1950, when few people had even heard of computers.) But these sections of his paper are not what has made it so historically significant. The part that has seized our imagination, to the point where thousands who have never seen the paper nevertheless clearly remember it, is Turing’s proposed test for determining whether a computer is thinking—an experiment he calls the Imitation Game, but which is now known as the Turing Test.
READ the rest of the article by Mark Halpern.
via robots.net
humanoid from here
36 comments Real men never define acronyms; they understand them genetically
Friday, January 20, 2006, 09:19 PM - Robots
You know you need it: Roedy Green's guide To Write Unmaintainable Code. Become irreplaceable. Ensure a job for life.
In the interests of creating employment opportunities in the Java programming field, I am passing on these tips from the masters on how to write code that is so difficult to maintain, that the people who come after you will take years to make even the simplest changes. Further, if you follow all these rules religiously, you will even guarantee yourself a lifetime of employment, since no one but you has a hope in hell of maintaining the code. Then again, if you followed all these rules religiously, even you wouldn't be able to maintain the code!
You don't want to overdo this. Your code should not look hopelessly unmaintainable, just be that way. Otherwise it stands the risk of being rewritten or refactored.
blink!
The Python Grimoire
Friday, January 20, 2006, 08:37 PM - Robots
grimoire /grimwaar/ (noun) ::= a book of magic spells and invocations. Origin: French, alteration of grammaire 'grammar'. A grammar is a description of a set of symbols and how to combine them to create well-formed sentences. A grimoire is a description of a set of magical symbols and how to combine them properly. It is sort of a recipe-book for magic spells. See also Grimoire
The core of the Grimoire was originally developed and released by Andrew M. Kuchling in May, 1999. However, it never reached a stage where Andrew felt that it was ready for publication, and eventually he withdrew it. Steve Ferg, however, had found the Grimoire very helpful as he was learning Python, and he persuaded Andrew to allow him to take over maintenance of the document in August, 2002.
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Practice Makes Perfect: manufactured art
Saturday, September 10, 2005, 07:50 PM - Robots
Southern Exposure presents Practice Makes Perfect: Bay Area Conceptual Craft, an exhibition that investigates the intersection between craft and conceptual art in diverse media by local emerging and established artists. This exhibition will be on view from September 9 to October 15, 2005; and an opening reception will be held on Friday, September 9th from 7 to 9pm. The exhibition and reception are free and open to the public.
Organized by members of Southern Exposure’s Curatorial Committee, this exhibition establishes the significance of conceptually oriented craft practices as a local and national movement. Practice Makes Perfect explores the work of a group of emerging and established Bay Area artists who utilize highly refined skills to produce conceptually based work. The exhibiting artists undertake labor-intensive actions that are deliberate, elaborate, and verge on the obsessive. Employing materials ranging from the traditional paper, fabric, and wood to unconventional found and damaged objects, they produce work that is rooted in conceptual art, moving beyond well-honed techniques to convey a complex set of ideas. In essence, their craft exists in the service of content.
Featured artists include Ann Chamberlain, Amy Franceschini/ Michael Swaine, David Ireland, Bernie Lubell, Christian Maychack, Jim Melchert, Scott Oliver, Stephanie Syjuco, Mark Thompson, Tony Tredway, and Anna Von Mertens.
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STATE OF PLAY - MMORPG public space design competition
Saturday, September 10, 2005, 03:28 PM - Robots, Media
Do you enjoy building things in a virtual world? Ever built a virtual house or terraformed a virtual landscape? How about designing public space for your metaverse? Maybe this public architecture resembles the public spaces of old like town squares, markets, transportation hubs or town halls. Maybe not. This competition invites designers and architects to submit examples of the best public, democratic or civic architecture in a virtual world.
Architects from virtual worlds across the universe are invited to submit their designs for public spaces and structures to the State of Play Virtual Public Space Design Competition by September, 28 2005. The State of Play is the annual conference on Law, Videogames and Virtual Worlds (http://www.nyls.edu/stateofplay) co-sponsored by New York Law School’s Institute for Information Law & Policy, Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society and Yale Law School’s Information Society Project.
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