"charles_kalish.EdServices"@XEROX.COM (10/16/86)
Maybe we should start a new mail group where we try to convince each other that we understand the turing test if everybody fails we go back to the drawing board and design a new test. And as the first entry: In response to Daniel Simon's questioning of the appropriateness of this test, I think the answer is that the Turing test is acceptable because that's how we recognize each other as intelligent beings. Usually we don't do it in a rigorous way because everybody always passes it. But if I ask you to "please pass the Cheez-whiz" and you respond "Anita Eckbart is marinating her poodle" then I would get a little suspicious and ask more questions designed to figure out whether you're joking, sick, hard of hearing, etc. Depending on your answers I may decide to downgrade your status to less than full personhood. About Stevan Harnad's two kinds of Turing tests: I can't really see what difference the I/O methods of your system makes. It seems that the relevant issue is what kind of representation of the world it has. While I agree that to really understand the system would need some non-purely conventional representation (not semantic if "semantic" means "not operable on in a formal way" as I believe [given the brain is a physical system] all mental processes are formal then "semantic" just means governed by a process we don't understand yet) giving and getting through certain kinds of I/O doesn't make much difference. Two for instances: SHRDLU operated on a simulated blocks world. The modifications to make it operate on real block would have been peripheral and not have effected the understanding of the system. Also, all systems take analog input and give analog output. Most receive finger pressure on keys and return directed streams of ink or electrons. It may be that a robot would need more "immediate" (as opposed to conventional) representations, but it's neither necessary nor sufficient to be a robot to have those representations. P.s. don't ask me to be the moderator for this new group. The turing test always assumes the moderator has some claim to expertise in the matter.
PHayes@SRI-KL.ARPA (Pat Hayes) (10/17/86)
Daniel R. Simon has worries about the Turing test. A good place to find intelligent discussion of these issues is Turings original article in MIND, October 1950, v.59, pages 433 to 460. Pat Hayes PHAYES@SRI-KL -------
ABOULANGER@G.BBN.COM (Albert Boulanger) (10/28/86)
I think it is amusing and instructive to look at real attempts of the turing test. One interesting attempt is written up in the post scriptum of the chapter: "A Coffeehouse Conversation on the Turing Test" Metamagical Themas Douglas Hofstadter Basic Books 1985 Albert Boulanger BBN Labs -------
colonel@buffalo.CSNET ("Col. G. L. Sicherman") (10/31/86)
PHayes@SRI-KL.ARPA (Pat Hayes) writes: > Daniel R. Simon has worries about the Turing test. A good place to find > intelligent discussion of these issues is Turings original article in MIND, > October 1950, v.59, pages 433 to 460. That article was in part a response to G. Jefferson's Lister Oration, which appeared as "The mind of mechanical man" in the British Medical Journal for 1949 (pp. 1105-1121). It's well worth reading in its own right. Jefferson presents the humane issues at least as well as Turing presents the scientific issues, and I think that Turing failed to rebut, or perhaps to comprehend, all Jefferson's objections.