ntt@dciem.UUCP (ntt) (08/17/83)
Background (recap):
In a 1940's article called "Can a Machine Think?", Alan Turing
presented a criterion for answering that, namely, converse with it over
a terminal and try to tell from the dialogue that it's not a human*.
He makes an analogy with trying to tell the sex of another human whom
you're conversing with in the same fashion. (The article can be found in
J.R.Newman's anthology "The World of Mathematics", and is still worth
reading.)
Gene Spafford points out that we in net.land are conversing in very
much that fashion, and some of us might be men, blacks, handicapped, AI
projects, etc.... Could you tell the sex of decvax!utzoo!dciem!ntt from this,
if I hadn't signed my name at the bottom? Should senders to net.women
identify themselves by sex, actually?
I would like to point out Douglas Hofstadter's column in Scientific
American for May 1981, which is about the Turing test, mainly in regard
to computer intelligence, but also with regard to telling men from women.
The entire column is in the form of a dialogue between "Chris, a physics
student, Pat, a biology student, and Sandy, a philosophy student"... so
Notice that each of these names can be female or male. I didn't!
I just assigned each the sex of a person I knew with that name...but that
happened to coincide fairly well with the sex distribution of people in
the appropriate faculties at Waterloo. Hofstadter never points out
explicitly that the sex of the students is unstated... he doesn't "appear"
in the article at all, being the meta-author of the dialogue. (He did
discuss it later.) Is there a Hebrew edition of Sci.Am.? I wonder how
they translated this item...
Mark Brader, NTT Systems Inc., Toronto
*I was going to say "person" rather than "human", but then I remembered
that the term "person" includes corporations. I suspect it will include
artificial intelligences also, if they are developed to the point of
legal recognition. Perhaps "personufacturing" should be changed to
"individualufacturing"? :-)
Oh yes... the sex of ...dciem!ntt is CORPORATION.