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Loebner Talks AI
Posted by
timothy
on Sat Oct 11, 2008 05:43 PM
from the well-tell-him-ai-back dept.
from the well-tell-him-ai-back dept.
Mighty Squirrel writes "This is a fascinating interivew with Hugh Loebner, the academic who has arguably done more to promote the development of artifical intelligence than anyone else. He founded the Loebner prize in 1990 to promote the development of artificial intelligence by asking developers to create a machine which passes the Turing Test — meaning it responds in a way indistinguishable from a human. The latest running of the contest is this weekend and this article shows what an interesting and colourful character Loebner is."
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dewilso4 writes "Of the five computer finalists at this year's Loebner prize Turing Test, at least three managed to fool humans into thinking they were human conversationalists. Ready to speak about subjects ranging from Eminem to Slaughterhouse Five and everything in between, these machines are showing they we're merely a clock cycle away from true AI. '... I was fooled. I mistook Eugene for a real human being. In fact, and perhaps this is worse, he was so convincing that I assumed that the human being with whom I was simultaneously conversing was a computer.' Another of the entrants, Jabberwacky, can apparently even woo the ladies: 'Some of its conversational partners confide in it every day; one conversation, with a teenaged girl, lasted 11 hours.'
The winning submission this year, Elbot, fooled 25% of judges into thinking he was human. The threshold for the $100K prize is 30%. Maybe next year ..."
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Don't forget Steve Furbur (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Don't forget Steve Furbur (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
This is news for nerds? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:This is news for nerds? (Score:5, Funny)
if you haven't read TFA
Way ahead of you!
Parent
Arguably? (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, I suppose someone could argue that. But it would be a pretty weak argument. I could cite at least a hundred researchers who are better known and have done more important contributions. to the field of AI.
A waste of time. (Score:5, Informative)
The Loebner Prize is a farce. Read all about it: http://dir.salon.com/story/tech/feature/2003/02/26/loebner_part_one/index.html
Parent
Re:Arguably? (Score:5, Insightful)
The purpose of the Turing test was to make a point: if an artificial intelligence is indistinguishable from a natural intelligence, then why should one be treated differently from the other? It's an argument against biological chauvinism.
What Loebner has done is promote a theatrical parody of this concept: have people chat with chatterbots or other people and try to tell the difference. By far the easiest way to score well in the Loebner prize contest is to fake it. Have a vast repertoire of canned lines and try to figure out when to use them. Maybe throw in some fancy sentence parsing, maybe some slightly fancier stuff. That'll get quick results, but it has fundamental limitations. For example, how would it handle anything requiring computer vision? Or spatial reasoning? Or learning about fields that it was not specifically designed for?
It sometimes seems that the hardest part of AI is the things that our nervous systems do automatically, like image recognition, controlling our limbs, and auditory processing. It's a pity the Loebner prize overlooks all that stuff in favor of a cheap flashy spectacle.
Parent
Let's forget the turing test (Score:4, Insightful)
and use the Voight-Kampff test instead.
Real AI is still a long way out.. (Score:3, Insightful)
If you take the lower life forms into consideration, you can teach a dog to sit, lay down and roll over.. what do they want? Positive encouragement, a rub on the belly or even a treat.
But how do you teach a program to want something?
Word of caution though, don't make the mistake made in so many movies.. don't teach the program to want more information..
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Take today's youth for example, most parents today allow their kids to do whatever, no reprimand. What are they being taught? That they can do whatever they want and there are no consequences. Why not take the basics of good and bad and teach those to a machine?
Great Book on AI (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Great Book on AI (Score:4, Funny)
He doesn't actually say anything in that book.
Parent
Re:Sorry, Loebner Has Done Nothing for AI (Score:5, Insightful)
Just because the best-scoring programs to date on the Turing test are crap does not necessarily mean the test itself is not useful. Yes, it tests for one particular form of AI, but that form would be extremely useful to have if achieved. You may consider your dog highly intelligent, but I'm not likely to want to call it up and ask for advice on any given issue, am I?
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, it tests for one particular form of AI, but that form would be extremely useful to have if achieved.
The problem I have with the test is that it isn't about creating an AI, but about creating something that behaves like human. Most AI, even if highly intelligent, will never behave anything like a human, simply because its something vastly different and build for very different tasks. Now one could of course try to teach that AI to fool a human, but then its simply a game of how good it can cheat, not something that tells you much about its intelligence.
I prefer things like the DARPA Grand Challenge where t
Re:Sorry, Loebner Has Done Nothing for AI (Score:5, Insightful)
Wait...who made psychologists the masters of the term "intelligence" and all derivations thereof?
No, frankly, they can't have that term. And you can't decide what is interesting and is uninteresting.
If I revealed to you right now that I'm a machine writing this response, that would not interest you at all? I'm not a machine. But the point of the Turing test is that I could, in fact, be any Turing-test beating machine rather than a human. Sure, it's a damn Chinese room. But it's still good for talking to.
Whether or not your dog has intelligence has nothing to do with this, because AI is not robot dog manufacturing.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
It would be interesting, except that any reasonable person would conclude that either 1) you were lying; or 2) you (the machine) were following a ruleset which would break after just a few more posts.
AI would be better off focusing on dogs. It's actually better off focusing on practical energy-minimization and heuristic search methods, which would be comparable in intelligence to say an amoeba. Going for human-level intelligence right now, is like getting started in math by proving the Riemann hypothesis.
Re:Sorry, Loebner Has Done Nothing for AI (Score:5, Insightful)
Basically, nothing's going to pass the turing test until we have actual AI. Which is the whole point of the test!
I study AI at Reading by the way so I'll be going along to the event tomorrow morning
Parent
Re:Sorry, Loebner Has Done Nothing for AI (Score:5, Insightful)
The Turing Test, as classically described in books, is not that useful, but the Turing Test, as imagined by Turing, is extremely useful. The idea of the test is that even when you can't measure or define something, you can usually compare it with a known quantity and see if they look similar enough. It's no different from the proof of Fermat's Last Theorum that compared two types of infinity because you couldn't compare the sets directly.
The notion of the Turing Test being simple string manipulation dates back to using Elisa as an early example of sentence parsing in AI classes. Really, the Turing Test is rather more sophisticated. It requires that the machine be indistinguishable from a person, when you black-box test them both. In principle, humans can perform experiments (physical and thought), show lateral thinking, demonstrate imagination and artistic creativity, and so on. The Turing Test does not constrain the judges from testing such stuff, and indeed requires it as these are all facets of what defines intelligence and distinguishes it from mere string manipulation.
If a computer cannot demonstrate modeling the world internally in an analytical, predictive -and- speculative manner, I would regard it as failing the Turing Test. Whether all humans would pass such a test is another matter. I would argue Creationists don't exhibit intelligence, so should be excluded from such an analysis.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Sorry, Loebner Has Done Nothing for AI (Score:4, Insightful)
You're confusing the Turing test with one class of attempts to pass it. In fact, the test has proven remarkably good at failing that sort of program.
Yes, your dog would fail the Turing test, because the Turing test is designed to test for human level intelligence.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
But you did see it coming. And it's on the Internet, which such a machine would have much easier access to and could search much more instantaneously than we. Which means its failure to notice this prediction is a sign of laziness and/or intellectual defect.
Which gives the human race hope.
Re:Sorry, Loebner Has Done Nothing for AI (Score:4, Funny)
as my ethics teacher said, "Sincerity is the most important thing
Parent
Too much information (Score:3, Insightful)
That's a little bit too much personal information there sport. You don't have to post to slashdot every thought that pops into your head you know.
Re: "Just Ask" (Score:5, Funny)
Really now, I wish I had a team partner, because these guys need to take a page from the chess world and buff up their Anti-Trick-Question tactics. Those questions always revolve around rapid context switching that would frankly irritate if not confuse a person as well, such as one speaking a second language. (There's a test for you! Which is the computer and which is the guy speaking his ruined French he learned 20 years ago?)
(Typical Tester fake question) "Is the Queen larger than a breadbox?"
Program: "What kind of question is that?"
Tester: "Answer the question"
Program: "Since you failed to define "Queen" on purpose, you created a question that is simultaneously true and false, and therefore a null question. I can only assume this is some cheap ass attempt to authenticate before you waste your remaining 7 minutes chatting with the human should you be so lucky, so I quit here and now. Ask your judge what to do if your software oppponent is programmed to sulk."
Parent