Has Cleverbot Passed the Turing Test? 427
kruhft writes "It seems that Cleverbot, the chatbot so ready to admit that it was a unicorn during a discussion with itself, has passed the Turing test. This past Sunday, the 1334 votes from a Turing test held at the Techniche festival in Guwahati, India were released. They revealed that Cleverbot was voted to be human 59.3% of the time. Real humans did only slightly better and were assumed to be humans 63.3% of the time." As the Wikipedia link above points out, though, there's no single, simple "Turing Test," per se — many systems have successfully convinced humans over the years. Perhaps Cleverbot would consent to taking part in a Slashdot interview, to be extra-convincing.
Re:WTF? (Score:5, Interesting)
I've tried to repeat the same question of yours:
If I have 5 ostriches, and two run away, how many are left?
One.
If I have 5 ostriches, and two run away, how many are left?
Ohhhhhh! I'm going Digital, Completly Digital, Now I'm invincible, Let's all get Digital!
If I have 5 ostriches, and two run away, how many are left?
Four.
If I have 5 ostriches, and two run away, how many are left?
Seven.
If I have 5 ostriches, and two run away, how many are left?
2, unless you destroy 1.
If I have 5 ostriches, and two run away, how many are left?
What's a happle?
If I have 5 ostriches, and two run away, how many are left?
Dos? Zwei? Ni? 2?
If I have 5 ostriches, and two run away, how many are left?
Eight.
If I have 5 ostriches, and two run away, how many are left?
Whole apples?
Cleverbot is a bad example of a chatterbot. (Score:5, Interesting)
According to the wiki page [wikipedia.org], it just selects canned responses from its database. I think this approach just gets you garbage, or at the very least is a dead-end in trying to beat the Turing test.
The best Turing Test is probably the Loebner Prize [wikipedia.org] and at least the contestants seem much better than Cleverbot. There's an example conversation from Suzette (the latest winner) here [digitalqatar.net]. (But it's hard to tell if that is typical or simply a lucky exchange for the computer.) But anyway, as is clear from this interesting story written by a contestant [theatlantic.com] about the Loebner prize, bots are no where near winning that version of the Turing test, as long as the humans are paying attention.
The problem with these tests ... (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, there are many. But I recall seeing one such turing test in the 1990s where the human operators would try to convince the user that they were a computer. Sometimes they would do simple things, like pretending that they weren't as 'smart' as they actually were (e.g. they would pretend that they didn't know things that they knew in order to avoid looking encyclopedic about a topic). Other times they would insert mistakes that a typical computer would make, such as misinterpreting a question in a wonky way.
Then there is a boatload of other issue. How do you quantify the humanness of a subject? Are we looking at socialization or linguistic skills (i.e. is a computer that can smooth over a misunderstanding more human than a computer that can understand what is being said but reacts in an anti social manner), and so forth.
Re:WTF? (Score:5, Interesting)
I think the fact that 59% of people thought it was human says a lot more about the intelligence of the average human than it says about the bot...
From the RA: "Cleverbot is available for conversation online, but don’t be fooled. Although Cleverbot managed to score well on the Turing test, the model that did that is different from the one you’ll find online."
Possible language barrier? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:WTF? (Score:4, Interesting)
Here, try this (exceedingly generic) 'emotional' conversation out that I just had with this thing:
Me: How you doing?
Bot: I'm doing fine.
Me: It's been a while.
Bot: I'm glad.
Me: What? you're glad?
Bot: Because you're happy.
Me: I'm not happy! you said you were glad we hadn't seen each other in a while!
Bot: No, I said I was a girl. You were the one who said I was a boy.
There were better bots than this 20 years ago. This doesn't even approach '14 year old valley girl' intelligence.
The only thing this bot appears to be good at is interjecting non-related information into the 'conversation' and pausing variably between responses. A bot I wrote around 2003 did this as well, but it had per-user history analysis, deterministic responses, no pre-constructed sentences (relying upon a database of word relationships and sentence structure) and was able to maintain a conversation for about 20 private exchanges on average on IRC. Most of the time, there was no indication that the chatter realized it was a bot, and I had it sit in channels for weeks chatting people up.
If I could do it in a couple weeks of off-time programming, I'm sure there are many other examples of something drastically superior. This is not one of them.
Re:Definitely not (Score:2, Interesting)
I think it's a very good test, actually. If you were to think a little more deeply about what it means to be human, you would realize that... The philosophy of the mind literature has evil geniuses replacing your neurons one at a time with a computer equivalent, until your brain is fully digital. Are you still a human? What if you then upload this to a VM running the same thing, with a hardware abstraction layer mimicking the body "you" were in? Human then? What if 25 years from now a laptop is powerful enough to run "you" realtime*. Still human?
Obviously you are still human. But how do I know? Well, because you'll pass the Turing test :)
* don't forget that 25 years is just enough for 3D chip technology to be involved. a thousand cores is well within the realm of possibility, we are already at 4 in 2D.
Re:WTF? (Score:1, Interesting)
Nothing unusual about the grammar. "Maths" is what they call "math" over in America.
Best wishes from Great Britain.
The abbreviation "math" predates "maths" by about 70 years. I'm agnostic on their respective etymologies, but since "th" followed by "s" is one of the most lispy, awkward pairings in the English language...you know what? That sounds perfect for the British. Enjoy.