Transcript
Is there a transcript of this conversation available?
Ukrainian teen created in lab passes Turing Test – famous nutty prof
Some software has supposedly passed the Turing Test – a controversial benchmark of artificial intelligence – by fooling a handful of humans into thinking it's a talkative 13-year-old Ukrainian lad. Cyborg prof Kevin Warwick argues this is the first time a machine has ever passed the famous test. We're told the successful chat …
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Monday 9th June 2014 09:33 GMT diodesign
Re: Transcript
I'm hunting for transcripts. In the meantime, this is the sort of level of conversation you can have with the public online version (DDoSed under popularity)
C.
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Monday 9th June 2014 12:22 GMT VinceH
Re: Transcript
Indeed. I didn't see much in that conversation that made it look significantly better than something I wrote at a YTS place over 30 years ago, other than benefiting from greater storage (and processor grunt) to provide a much bigger range of data.
I despair at the judges.
Edit: I've just spotted that the example transcript was from just after one of the previous attempts, when it achieved just under 30% - so it may have improved since then. But I still despair at the judges in that attempt.
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Monday 9th June 2014 14:25 GMT sisk
Re: Transcript
I could see it fooling some people if they believed they were talking to a human with less than stellar command of the English language (such as could be expected from a 13 year old Ukrainian), but 30% of humans? I think that's pushing it.
Then again, people are stupid and will believe whatever they want to be true or what they fear is true.
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Monday 9th June 2014 17:54 GMT Blitterbug
Re: 30% of humans? I think that's pushing it.
Perhaps we need an 'advanced' Turing Test, judged solely by IT types. Seriously. As has been said here several times, this was a really dreadful Eliza hash without anything to show the improvements that have been made in AI in the 30-odd years since that program was being bashed into every home computer on the planet.
If it can fool > 30% of developers, I'll definitely sit up and take note.
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Tuesday 10th June 2014 05:02 GMT spatulasnout
Re: Transcript
In the transcript, it had begun to seem like a chat bot by its second reply:
J: What did you do today so far?
E: Since early this morning I’ve been involved in this funny contest. I also plan to visit some interesting places in Atlanta.
The "funny contest" part was cute, but the Atlanta part already seemed like an embellishment that doesn't quite mesh with the question being asked--in a manner so typical of chat bot responses.
I wonder what kind of briefing is given to the judges beforehand. The simplest bit of advice to the judges could thwart any chat bot I've yet encountered: try to teach it something.
I usually start out by attempting to teach them how to draw even the simplest possible shapes as ASCII art. (The simplest way to draw a "star" might be an asterisk.) Unsurprisingly, the bot immediately begins dithering and misdirecting and trying to change the subject. Not one has yet even made a pretense of being willing to attempt learning something.
Of course, if ASCII art shapes became a popular question, bot authors would code in some logic for that. The key is just finding something simple it doesn't yet know how to do (that any human could easily respond to and learn) and trying to teach it that.
The day someone makes a bot that can navigate these simple interactive learning tasks and actually add new tricks and vocabulary to its repertoire in the process, I'll be genuinely impressed (regardless of how it might perform in a Turing test setting conversationally.)
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Monday 9th June 2014 23:40 GMT Yes Me
Re: Excuse the philosophical question...
It turns out to be quite amusing to ask Eugene that question over and over:
Q. Can the Turing Test be automated?
A. Oops! I don't have an answer... It might have been stolen by malicious android!
Q. Can the Turing Test be automated?
A. Don't repeat yourself, please:-) Could you tell me about your job, by the way?
Q. Do you know about Spinoza?
A. Dutch philosopher. It looks like you didn't go to school. So you don't know anything about Baruch Spinoza.
Q. Can the Turing Test be automated?
A. Ummm... Frankly, I didn't get your question:-(
Q. Can the Turing Test be automated?
A. Could you rephrase your question? I've been bewildered a bit!
Q. Can the Turing Test be automated?
A. Don't repeat yourself, please:-) Oooh. Anything else?
How could anybody be misled for a moment by this?
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Monday 9th June 2014 09:25 GMT Jonathan Richards 1
Language skills?
Was the conversation conducted in Eugene's native language, which I presume is Ukrainian, or in English? If the latter, I suggest that this is not the scenario that Alan Turing was envisaging. I'd make an uninformed guess that the best discriminators between AIs and humans are currently language-based jokes.
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Monday 9th June 2014 11:37 GMT BlueGreen
Re: Language skills?
That's what I thought. If you can play it that way, here's my entry (inspired, unfortunately, from real life)
10 print "Waah! Waah! Waaaa!"
20 goto 10
To be fair, the accompanying transcript of Eugene isn't totally unimpressive. It shouldn't fool anyone but in its limited way it's not bad.
(edit: and Kevin Warwick is a tit)
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Monday 9th June 2014 13:24 GMT Mage
Re: Language skills?
As well as that doubt was cast on the concept of Touring test YEARS ago when Eliza was written. Given the quality of Reality TV and Soaps you need an expert.
IMO even when the "The Touring Test" can be passed well enough fool experts, it doesn't mean anything about progress on AI, just progress on simulation of conversation. Just like Chess was thought to need AI and Alan Turing himself proved it didn't.
I think anyway Alan Turing's comment was an off the cuff statement rather than anything with any mathematical proof, unlike his paper about solvable & unsolvable problems illustrated with the infinite paper tape driven computer. ("Turing Machine").
Of course Kevin Warwick involved makes one think it may be ill-informed hype.
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Monday 9th June 2014 11:59 GMT diodesign
Re: Mike
"I wonder if Prof Cyborg will deign to publish his results in a peer-reviewed journal"
I hear the results from Saturday will be put into a paper of some sort. Waiting for the university to get back to me. I gather the uni denied the Telegraph access to the transcripts, so this could turn interesting.
C.
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Monday 9th June 2014 17:49 GMT Ken Hagan
Re: What's the opposite of a Turing test?
"I wonder what would happen if this "character" met up with his forebears PARRY or ELIZA."
That's an interesting idea. One of the problems of the Turing test is that any sane human will give the machine the benefit of the doubt and "rescue" any conversation that is heading for the madhouse. So why not instead put two instances of <test-subject> into conversation with each other and ask your human to judge whether the resulting conversation is between two humans or two machines?
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Monday 9th June 2014 09:58 GMT Matt_payne666
Re: From reading the sample above linked by DioDesign
I'd hate to check the condition of the computers these judges own....... I'm guessing that they have reset their banking credentials, downloaded their parcel redirects and are currently waiting for the reimbursement of $Millions from some Nigerian bank account they have inherited...
Yes, some replies are natural language replies... but a lot are the sort of guff you would expect Siri, Cortana or some clever internet chat page to come up with...
Here is hoping that Eugene was an early beta version....
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Monday 9th June 2014 09:41 GMT Pete 2
Intelligence on the internet?
The ability to imitate a 13 y/o boy is a good goal - if you're a 12 y/o boy.
However, I feel that if Alan Turing was alive today, and looked at the traffic on the world's most popular social media sites, he would (quite naturally) assume that they were test-beds for AI's and that there was still a long, long way to go before any of them appeared even faintly human.
If this result tells us anything, it's that a test devised right at the dawn of the IT era, before there was any experience of AI to draw on, is too limited to be useful. Just as we don't believe that aircraft imitate birds (even though they both fly), we shouldn't consider this anything like a computer imitating a person.
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Tuesday 10th June 2014 09:14 GMT Pascal Monett
Totally agree
From the extract in the article itself, the Turing Test makes no mention that the subject tested is supposed to be anything but an adult.
But hey, you gotta start somewhere. Personally, I would have failed it straightaway. 13-year-olds use way to much l33tsp35k for me to understand them. This one wrote complete sentences. That, in my book, is a dead giveaway that it can't be a human child.
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Biting the hand that feeds IT
