From: spike66 (spike66@attbi.com)
Date: Sat Feb 08 2003 - 11:46:53 MST
Dossy wrote:
> On 2003.02.07, Jones, Spike <spike.jones@lmco.com> wrote:
>
>>Congratulations to Junior's programmers! Its all
>>over for carbon on this planet. {8^D
>
> Lucky for us, when computers finally play chess better than humans
> outright, it's in the nature of humans to create a brand new game that
> we excel and watch computers catch up again ... ;-)
We have that game: the Turing test.
> The long-standing challenge of the Turing test still hasn't been
> defeated by computers, workstation-class or otherwise ...-- Dossy
Not so fast. Chess computers climbed the chess
ranks in 50 years. Simplifying a little, tournament
chess has seven ranks, D, C, B, A, expert, master
and grandmaster. When I was in college in 1980, the
commercially available software was just breaking into
the Cs. They climbed a rank about every four years
since then, with this year being the landmark year
where commercial software can be considered about
equal to the top human grandmaster.
When Turing envisioned the Turing test whereby one
would converse with a computer and not be able to
tell it from a human, he was describing a grandmaster
Turing machine.
I would suggest we have D rated, and perhaps C rated
Turing machines today, as demonstrated by the guy who
set up an Eliza-like program to converse over the
internet in a teen chat group. Modern teenagers
generally have never heard of Eliza, the simulated
psychologist that their parents had so much fun with
when they were teens.
I no longer have the URL, perhaps someone here has
it. But he posted a number of e-conversations between
C and D rated intellects (the teenagers), some of
which conversed with Eliza for *an hour or more*
never realizing their correspondant was a machine!
Of those few that did eventually catch on, it was
because the machine responses were too fast. Many
of them made comments such as "damn you type fast."
Several of them thought it was a lascivious old man
but they generally didn't figure out it was a
computer.
I would suggest that this exercise is a demonstration
of a C rated Turing machine, about where computer
chess was 25 years ago. I am not suggesting that
machines will climb a rank every 4 or 5 years, but
the point is we should expect software to improve
steadily, not pop out suddenly at grandmaster
strength in the Turing test.
Some of those conversations were so hilarious. Teen
girls would say to the machine "...you are such a
good listener, we should meet offline..." etc. I
thought I was going to wet my diapers.
Anyone still have that URL? spike
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