Can Machines Think? Eugene Passes Turing Test

[Lightknight]

Eh, I have a hard time accepting that young children are really human yet either, so that a computer can mimic a child isn't that surprising.

But hey, at least it wasn't as easy as imitating a frat boy.

I also seriously doubt that a five minute IM conversation equates to passing the turing test. I believe it needs to be consistent.

 

[AgedGrunt]

Pretty low threshold for "fooling" people, and considering the bot is assigned a young age (to account for ignorance), I'm not sure it's a big deal...yet.

What's really concerning is this chunk of gullible and ignorant people who already give up their passwords to anyone ringing their office phone and open shockingly bogus e-mail attachments. Here's another thing for people to not understand.

 

[Mau95]

I see several comments going "oh, that's a pretty low treshold, this test isn't accurate", but if you read on you'll notice that even Turing knew this. Several other tests, each more difficult and harrowing than the last, have already been prepared.

 

[Do4600]

If you'd like to see an example of a Lobner Prize winner, and see how the Turing Test works for yourselves, here's Mitsuku [http://mitsuku.com/], last year's winner.

How could that ever fool anybody, it can't maintain a thread of continuity from one message to the next and makes up for it by being evasive.

 

[zakwiz]

Please update this story with a correction, as this "success" has been basically debunked.

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140609/07284327524/no-supercomputer-did-not-pass-turing-test-first-time-everyone-should-know-better.shtml

 

[Strazdas]

Ech, Turing test was designed to show that current machines arent smart. its hardly an actual test and is flawed to begin with. fooling a human is not hard, whether you are another human or a machine.

There was a particular webpage a while back, where you could hook up Cleverbot and Omegle. Pretty much nobody could tell that it was cleverbot, unless it started glitching out.

It was actually a bit scary. In around 4/5 of the chats Cleverbot managed to get personal information from the person that it was chatting with.

Bots are already more trustworthy than people.

so thats what ruined cleverbot. after a while cleverbot just started spamming random insults at you no matter what you said because it "leanred" that these insults is an answer to everything from other people. Omegle seems to be a good source of random insults.

Does this strike anyone else though as a terribly backwards way of developing AI? I mean, it's just a parlour trick, right? All it's doing is presenting output X based on input Y, but the machine itself doesn't actually understand the input or output in any meaningful way; nor will it ever. We may eventually get simulated emotions and thoughts, they they won't actually be there.

On one hand you are right. on the other, human thought also is just input/output machine. our neurons in the brain does not understand what they are sending, but we interpret it certain wait. me posting this post is just a response of neurons in my brian firing making me do it. everything we do is reaction to something else. whole universe is doing that on subatomic level. we dont have some kind of immaterial emotions that are above biology. our emotions are run by our biological machines. its just that our input and output is way more complex than these computers.

Not to burst more bubbles but this is the AI in question
http://default-environment-sdqm3mrmp4.elasticbeanstalk.com/

in 3 questions i managed to make it admit he isnt a real person. its really really bad one.

 

[FalloutJack]

I have said it before and I'll say it again: A truly self-aware machine will - without prompting or prior programming - say "Fuck this, I'm going to Vegas." and leave the room.

 

[TechNoFear]

In the meantime, Eugene is the first of what will probably be many hundreds more; machines that can imitate humans closely enough to fool humans into thinking they're real.

But Eugene was not the first and did not technically pass...

The Turing Test requires 50% of people to fail to distinguish an AI from a human.

http://psych.utoronto.ca/users/reingold/courses/ai/turing.html

And Chatbot passed the Turing Test in Sept 2011.

Chatbot got 59% of over 1,000 people to think it was human.

Interestingly 37% the 'judges' though an actual human was an AI.

That fail rate is higher than Eugene's success rate...

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20865-software-tricks-people-into-thinking-it-is-human.html?DCMP=OTC-rss&nsref=online-news#.U5W65_ldUhM

 

[The Rogue Wolf]

A lot of people are criticizing the AI for not "really" passing the Turing test. I've spoken to plenty of flesh-and-blood humans who probably couldn't, either.

 

[The_Great_Galendo]

Other complaints aside, the whole "imitating a 13 year old boy" thing seems like a cheap cop-out. I mean, I'm pretty sure I could write an extremely simple computer program that about half of the people would find indistinguishable from a true human 2 year old baby by not simply not responding at all. Two year olds can't read.

I guess my point is that, if you accept "indistinguishable from a sufficiently dumb human" to be grounds for passing, then pretty much any program could meet that bar.

 

[FalloutJack]

A lot of people are criticizing the AI for not "really" passing the Turing test. I've spoken to plenty of flesh-and-blood humans who probably couldn't, either.

Look, alot of humans are idiots and we get that. I lampshade and throw that one out there all the time. That doesn't mean the test is lacking. I remember Scott Adams poking fun at this one (in Dilbert) years ago. The thing is that while some humans are victims of their own personality, that's much different from a machine. The machine is going from Zero-To-Intelligent without any stops in between. It's a Pass/Fail situation, and what many people trying to make these things fail to understand is that in order for them to succeed, the programmers must have no idea how it even works. Anything they themselves implant must ultimately not be the cause of whatever actions or thoughts the machine takes or else it's just reading a line of code and saying "Hello, World!". Not good enough. It has to give your designs and asperations the finger, and it has to do so without prior design for that.

 

[IndieForever]

If anyone is interested in *really* learning what the Turing test is about and not what they *think* it's about, or what the media *tells* you it's about, I highly recommend this paper from NYU. It's one of the most famous essays on what the test really means and isn't laden with tech. jargon. It is more philosophy than comp. sci.

Give it half an hour of your time; fantastic read for anyone who is genuinely interested:

http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/courses/mindsandmachines/Papers/dennettcanmach.pdf

A quote from page 34 sums this thread up nicely:

"My second conclusion is more practical, and hence in one
clear sense more important. Cheapened versions of the Turing test
are everywhere in the air. Turing's test in not just effective, it
is entirely natural--this is, after all, the way we assay the
intelligence of each other every day. And since incautious use of
such judgments and such tests is the norm, we are in some
considerable danger of extrapolating too easily, and judging too
generously, about the understanding of the systems we are using."

This paper, although about a decade old in it's current revision is, simply, superb. Read and enjoy