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Article 3022 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: markrose@spss.com (Mark Rosenfelder)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Table-lookup Chinese speaker
Message-ID: <1992Jan22.205804.39265@spss.com>
Date: 22 Jan 92 20:58:04 GMT
References: <1992Jan21.170056.23347@oracorp.com>
Organization: SPSS, Inc.
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For some reason I was assuming that the database had to store ALL sensible
conversations.  This leads to numerous problems.  However, we are on different
ground if the table stores, not all sensible replies to anything the
tester says, but merely a few particularly good ones.  (It can't store
just one response, or we would notice it making exactly the same responses
in repeated runs, which be a failure of the Turing test.)

Does this get us out of the water?  I don't think so.  I still think there's
a strategy to defeat the table-lookup machine: concentrate on questions
that rely on the present context.  (I have to admit that this strategy
was suggested by reading Mikhail Zeleny's post.)

For instance, ask the machine what today's date is.  Now, a reply with
today's date in it is sensible, but should not be placed in the database, 
because then it would be available if we run the machine tomorrow, too.
When we are constructing the database we will have to limit the machine's
responses to variations of "I don't know."  It will have to respond the
same way to questions like "What city are we in?", "What's the big news in
Washington this week?" and "What do you think about the Bulls this year?"

An accumulation of such responses would cause the machine to fail the Turing
test.  It's just too suspicious that all its statements, though reasonable
in themselves, so punctiliously avoid all reference to the current context.


