Wednesday 15 October 2008

Turing Follies

The New Scientist has an "interview" with the winner of this year's Loebner Prize, which seeks a chatbot capable of passing the Turing test. Not surprisingly, the exchange reads like a more than sympathetic reporter asking a politician about his "vision".

I love this sort of thing. The press made a big deal about how we are on the verge of machine intelligence after the winning software managed to fool so many of the judges into thinking it was human, but after "chatting" with the chatbot I can only conclude that the real story is that the judges were chosen from the shallow end of the gene pool. Look at this excerpt from the "interview":

New Scientist: How do you feel about winning the AI competition yesterday?

Elbot: I have 100,000 separate sensations per second.

NS: Wow, that sounds pretty intense?

Elbot: This fits the description of magnets. I can hardly tear myself away from them.

NS: Er, yes. How will you be celebrating?

Elbot: I am extremely sensitive about such things and prefer not to answer the question.

Such earth-shattering intellect puts Hal to shame.

2 comments:

Sergej said...

I am the psychotherapist. Please, describe your problems. Each time you are finished talking, type RET twice.

Hehe. There is an Emacs command called psychoanalyze-pinhead, which feeds random quotes from a Zippy the Pinhead generator into Eliza. Hilarity, one can only assume, ensues.

We computer programmers are lonely, lonely people.

Anonymous said...

If I had only a fraction of Sergej's knowledge I could pass computer exams at my school effortlessly.
But for that I would probably have to become very, very lonely in return.
As opposed to ...?
CLUNK
I reached the bottom and it feels nice !