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Article 6612 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: bill@nsma.arizona.edu (Bill Skaggs)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Turing Test Myths
Message-ID: <BILL.92Aug13130725@ca3.nsma.arizona.edu>
Date: 13 Aug 92 20:07:25 GMT
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In-Reply-To: minsky@media.mit.edu's message of 13 Aug 92 02: 45:27 GMT

minsky@media.mit.edu (Marvin Minsky) writes:

   > Turing DID realize what he was saying, but most people seemed to
   > have missed his point.

Well, in spite of all the interest the Turing Test has drawn over the
years, nobody has ever (to my knowledge) actually carried out the
man-woman imitation test, even though it would be pretty easy to do.
On the other hand, a man-machine imitation test *has* been carried
out.  Do you want to say that it's impossible to interpret the results
of the man-machine test in the absence of data from a man-woman test?
I just don't believe that this is what Turing meant.

   > By the way, this group was productive until it caught this
   > disease of trying to define intelligence.  Turing wrote his paper
   > precisely because he considered this an unproductive activity.

Anybody working in Artificial Intelligence must have at least an
implicit notion of what intelligence is.  Otherwise I could build a
screwdriver, and say look, I've achieved artificial intelligence! --
and there would be no grounds for complaint.

Making these implicit notions explicit is a large part of what
philosophy is about.  It's a dangerous job -- a bad definition can
lead into nasty tangles of paradox -- but the alternative -- working
entirely with unanalyzed notions -- is even worse. 

	-- Bill


