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Article 2772 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Table-lookup Chinese speaker
Message-ID: <5995@skye.ed.ac.uk>
Date: 15 Jan 92 21:33:15 GMT
References: <1992Jan14.045132.19208@oracorp.com> <1992Jan14.172756.46284@spss.com>
Reply-To: jeff@aiai.UUCP (Jeff Dalton)
Organization: AIAI, University of Edinburgh, Scotland
Lines: 35

In article <1992Jan14.172756.46284@spss.com> markrose@spss.com (Mark Rosenfelder) writes:
>In article <1992Jan14.045132.19208@oracorp.com> daryl@oracorp.com writes:
>>The fact that there are a huge number of conversations consistent with
>>what has been said so far is irrelevant: the computer only needs to
>>select a response that occurs in *some* conversation that agrees with
>>the current conversation so far. If more than one response is possible,
>>the computer just picks one. Conversations don't have to have a unique
>>outcome.
>
>Oh, come now.  Such a system would almost immediately fail the Turing test.
>Picture it in operation.  Your first utterance is "Hello."  The computer
>races through its database looking for conversations that begin with this
>sentence.  There are rather a lot of them; it picks one at random:
>"Ah, so we meet again, Professor Chung!!"  You are taken aback, not least
>because your name is Daryl.
>
>Now, the conversation "Hello."  "Ah, so we meet again, Professor Chung!"
>(or rather its translation into Chinese) is indeed a possible conversation,
>so it lives in the database.  But it's not appropriate.  The table lookup
>algorithm is incapable of any sense of context.  There are simply too many
>possible conversations at every point; all its replies will be nonsense.

Don't be so sure of that.  Consider, where P is a person and C the computer:

P: Hello.

C: Ah, so we meet again, Professor Chung!

P: I'm not Professor Chung!

C: My mistake.  I'm sorry, Professor Han!

P: But I'm not Han either!  Are you blind?

C: I didn't think so, but I'm certainly having some trouble.


