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AI Researchers Say 'Rascals' Might Pass Turing Test
Posted by
Zonk
on Thursday March 13, @04:04PM
from the who-wouldn't-love-those-scamps dept.
from the who-wouldn't-love-those-scamps dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Passing the Turing test is the holy grail of artificial intelligence (AI) and now researchers claim it may be possible using the world's fastest supercomputer (IBM's Blue Gene). This version of the Turing test pits a human conversing with a synthetic character powered by Rascals software crafted at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. RPI is aiming to pass AI's final exam this fall, by pairing the most powerful university-based supercomputing system in the world with its new multimedia group which is designing a holodeck, a la Star Trek."
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Firehose:AI researchers say 'Rascals' can pass Turing test by Anonymous Coward
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
But the real question is... (Score:5, Funny)
Do we really... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Do we really... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Do we really... (Score:4, Funny)
Misread (Score:5, Funny)
Creating a character won't help (Score:5, Insightful)
Real turing test (Score:5, Insightful)
I wonder if it's easier to do this in Japanese than English. From what I've read Japanese is easier to text message in because the object and direct object are usually inferred and there are no cases or articles. A single sentence can be one character and just a verb. Thus by constraining the nuance into discrete choices rather than sparsely populated product space of self-consistent cases, predicates and adjectives, perhaps japanese would be easier to generate turing worthy text.
Or maybe the reverse is true. But I'd bet one was a lot easier than the other.
Re:Real turing test (Score:5, Insightful)
Acting on behalf of...well, myself I guess. (Score:5, Interesting)
As we become more comfortable with accepting communication with each other through more abstracted proxies - like common chat applications currently and the recent neural voice collar (which pumps out a synthetic voice - even further proxy) - I wonder if we will in fact see what the author Stephen Baxter speculated, artificial clones of ourselves or our personalities handling our daily affairs.
I don't think it's too far out there to imagine interacting and planning a meeting with someone over the phone, only to find out later you had been talking to an AI facsimile of that individual.
What would (and may) be stranger yet, is considering the possibility that two AI facsimiles may in fact carry out real work or meetings from start to finish completely without the interaction of their 'owners'.
Re:Acting on behalf of...well, myself I guess. (Score:4, Interesting)
It will be quite some time before we have conversational intelligence out of AI systems. Retrieval speeds on Google searches are good, but at conversational pace, sifting through the information for some trace of relevance to the conversation is still going to be stilted and slow. Even then, finding some relevant response to a topic is not something that people do well.
We each have a sphere of stuff that we are familiar with. It is a human trait to act in one of several ways when conversation goes beyond that:
- walk away/ignore
- talk out of our asses like we do know when clearly we don't
- quietly observe to learn what others know
- change the subject
That as an example of what current AI conversation applications are not capable of.
In the case of an AI answering machine making a meeting appointment, it would only take one odd question, like: how about those cowboys? to throw the process out of whack if you did not know that you were talking to a machine.
AI does not thread thought and memories in the same way that we do, and this is part of what humans call humor.. when the story being told mismatches the thread/plot that we have in our heads. That depends hugely on the experience of the human involved, and the depth of their retained knowledge. both of these are missing in AI systems, and current technology will not allow for faking it past some limited point. The ability to switch to another 'almost' related conversation is something that AI cannot do without great memory stores, fast search/retrieval etc.
Imagine it like this: every sentence in a conversation is essentially a chess move. The game of chess has a finite bounded domain. A conversation with a human does not. The problem is far greater than a mimicry.
Re:Acting on behalf of...well, myself I guess. (Score:5, Interesting)
- talk out of our asses like we do know when clearly we don't
- quietly observe to learn what others know
- change the subject
That as an example of what current AI conversation applications are not capable of.
Actually, current AI "conversation" applications do all of the above all the time... that's one of the things that make them so easy to detect.
n the case of an AI answering machine making a meeting appointment, it would only take one odd question, like: how about those cowboys? to throw the process out of whack if you did not know that you were talking to a machine.
To be fair, that question, without any context, would confuse the majority of human beings also. Not everybody knows the names of American football teams
The game of chess has a finite bounded domain. A conversation with a human does not.
Are you sure? Human conversational domain might be finite, albeit quite a bit larger than the chess domain. At some point it becomes very difficult to tell the difference between "infinite" and just "very very very large"...
What crap (Score:5, Insightful)
"That's how we plan to pass this limited version of the Turing test."
If it's a limited version of the Turing Test, then it's not the Turing Test. They don't actually define exactly what the limits are. But any open ended test is doomed to failure based on our state of the art in A.I. (read: there is no science of Artificial Intelligence, in the sense of artificial cognition).
"What do you think a typical mother would say if she found out her daughter was going to enter the porn industry."
"Why do you think children have emotional attachments to their parents?"
"Which is worse, racism or sexism?"
"Would you rather be a fireman or an astronaut, and why?"
Any sort of open-ended question that requires human cultural knowledge and asking it to support its conclusion is going to cause it to barf.
Now, if the point of this is whether you can fool someone into thinking the Avatar was human when they didn't know it was a test, well, who cares? Eliza was able to do that back in the 1970s.
Lastly, who says the Turing Test (or any A.I. test) needs to take place in real time? I would be impressed if they came back with a human-level answer in a month of processing time. That's equivalent to a computer 2.5 million times faster than a computer that could produce the answer in one second. That they can't even do that should tell people that speed is not the problem in A.I. research. We have absolutely no fundamental model of how it all works.
If they're making a holodeck... (Score:5, Funny)
The Turing Test (Score:5, Interesting)
From the summary this "test" is not a strict Turing Test as it appears to be the machine talking to a human, alone, with no second human also talking to the first human. I could be wrong of course.
One of the things that makes this test so special, is that if you cannot tell the difference between a human and a computer, then essentially the computer is intelligent. Why? Because if you cannot tell the difference, what does it matter if the machine is really intelligent or not? Is the machine was really thinking or was it just cleverly programmed? The point is however, if you can't tell the difference, what does it matter? (Incidentally, I apply the same argument to the "question" of "free will".)
Anyway, if this machine (or personality) consistently passes a proper Turing Test, then yeah, that's pretty cool, and I want one on my computer, well so long as the personality type is compatible with my own (not a Marvin please...). (And I have a partner, so no need to make such jokes...)
The reason for the holodeck reference (Score:5, Informative)
One of the problems for any entity trying to communicate like a human is that we share some common knowledge which is based on our physical existence (pigs can't fly, but fall etc.) Some AI projects like (Open)Cyc [wikipedia.org] have tried to feed their AI with a very large number of simple facts, but to "understand" some concepts you have to experience them. Try to explain the difference between red and blue to someone who was born blind.
The 3D communication (holodeck) aspect mentioned is therefore an attempt to have an AI "living" in a human like space, to enable it to develop a similar world view. What's new about Rascals (Rensselaer Advanced Synthetic Architecture for Living Systems) seems to be something else ("Rascals is based on a core theorem proving engine that deduces results (proves theorems) about the world after pattern-matching its current situation against its knowledge base.") that is very computing intensive. Whether this will make any real difference remains to be seen, a lot of other approaches have failed and they so far have only succeeded with very limited models.
Re:yes, but is it really intelligent? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:yes, but is it really intelligent? (Score:5, Insightful)
But it will demonstrate that past a certain point we won't know the difference between real intelligence and something attempting to appear intelligent.
in fact, just what is intelligence / conciousness? if we can't define it, how can we hope to produce it?
If we can't tell the difference maybe there isn't one. Are you intelligent? Or are you just sufficiently complex enough that you simulate it well?
The Loebner Prize (Score:4, Informative)
Limiting the tenor: Further, only behavior evinced during the course of a natural conversation on the single specified topic would be required to be duplicated faithfully by the contestants. The operative rule precluded the use of ``trickery or guile. Judges should respond naturally, as they would in a conversation with another person.'' (The method of choosing judges served as a further measure against excessive judicial sophistication.)
Re:yes, but is it really intelligent? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:yes, but is it really intelligent? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:yes, but is it really intelligent? (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, you do have to admit that even humans are born with some very basic instincts, such as the desire to suckle when hungry, closing their hand when something is touching their palm, cry when they're uncomfortable (hungry, wet, tired, in pain) as well as the involuntary actions such as cardiopulminary functions.
That said, I would agree that you shouldn't have to give a machine anything more than basic resources to begin its process of learning, but you do need to give it something a rudimentary kernel to get it kick-started from the state of being an inanimate pile of silicon. From that kernel, it should be able to learn from its surroundings, build its own OS and begin to interact with its surroundings.
Re:yes, but is it really intelligent? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:yes, but is it really intelligent? (Score:5, Interesting)
The conditions I'd put on AI would be that it has to be able to improvise and create. It has to be able to learn and develop independently of it's program. Instructions which dictate how it should develop or how to deal with specific situations are prohibited.
One thing I'd suggest is important is desire, the desire to feed, to move, to do something. This would spur to develop itself to fulfill its desires. Otherwise it's just going to sit there.
Re:Turing Test is Nonsense (Score:4, Insightful)
Sure, writing a bot the does first post is easy.
We are talking about a conversation here, or even better a debate over a topic that requires evaluating new concepts on the fly.
We will know we are getting some where when we can gt a computer to changes it's mind on something from a conversation.
Re:Big Changes are comming. (Score:5, Funny)