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Article 6202 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: bill@nsma.arizona.edu (Bill Skaggs)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Transducers
Message-ID: <BILL.92Jun10174436@ca3.nsma.arizona.edu>
Date: 11 Jun 92 00:44:36 GMT
References: <1992Jun9.051649.9894@cs.ucf.edu> <BILL.92Jun8213911@ca3.nsma.arizona.edu>
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In-Reply-To: throop@aurs01.UUCP's message of 10 Jun 92 15: 43:44 GMT

throop@aurs01.UUCP (Wayne Throop) writes:

   With that said, lets agree for a moment with Bill that a clever TT
   judge/questioner, even without recourse to asking testee-appearance
   questions, might eventually foil most any non-humaniform testee (unless
   the testee was perternaturally intelligent).

   But this leads me to the question... why then the TTT?  We've just
   shown that the TT is (in the limit) equivalent to it.

   And on the other hand, does anybody really think that pressing
   questions about immediate sensual experience and manipulation
   capabilities is getting at the heart of the matter?  [ . . . ]

Time to recapitulate.  I'm willing to give credit for "thinking" to
any machine that can carry on an intelligent general-purpose
conversation in a natural language like English, and this I think was
the criterion Turing was aiming at.  But thus stated it is a vague
criterion:  what is an "intelligent general-purpose conversation"?
The Imitation Game was an attempt to make the criterion precise, but
for practical purposes the Game doesn't work very well, because it can
easily be won by the human contestant using the sort of trickery I
have described.

I also believe that, as a practical matter, it will be extremely
difficult to teach a machine to converse intelligently without giving
it rich sensory inputs and the ability to manipulate physical objects.
(I take no credit for this view: Turing said the same thing in 1948,
and many others have repeated it since.)  Note that this is only an
opinion, and one that many very clever AI workers would disagree with.
Doug Lenat, for example (but there are many others), has for years
been aiming at building intelligence by feeding the entire contents of
an encyclopedia to a computer.

	-- Bill


