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From: markrose@spss.com (Mark Rosenfelder)
Subject: Re: Bag the Turing test (was: Penrose and Searle)
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References: <1994Nov24.135351.25743@unix.brighton.ac.uk> <3befha$8u5@mp.cs.niu.edu> <D021p7.681@spss.com> <3bifsu$51m@mp.cs.niu.edu>
Date: Thu, 1 Dec 1994 21:56:04 GMT
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In article <3bifsu$51m@mp.cs.niu.edu>, Neil Rickert <rickert@cs.niu.edu> wrote:
[Alan Turing wrote:]
>>   "I believe that in about fifty years' time it will be possible to program
>>    computers... to make them play the imitation game so well that an average
>>    interrogator will not have more than 70 percent chance oc making the 
>>    right identification after five minutes of questioning....  I believe 
>>    that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated 
>>    opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak 
>>    of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted."
>
>I guess we are interpreting this differently.  Apparently you
>interpret it as a philosophical statement, or metaphysical claim,
>that Turing Test equals Intelligence.  

Not quite, since Turing strongly resisted defining intelligence.  I do think
he was making a weaker claim: a) "intelligence" has to do largely with the
verbal/intellectual abilities of humans; b) it being impossible to define it
any better than that, there's no useful distinction to be made between
human and artificial beings with those abilities.

>I interpret as a sociological
>statement, that people are likely to behave in a certain way when
>faced with TT passers.

Well, these interpretations are compatible.  Turing assumed that people would
come round to his view... and not all have, as a glance round comp.ai.philo
will tell. (Not that this is his fault!  I don't blame *everything* on Turing!)

>On my reading of Turing, I see him as stressing the importance of
>broad questioning.  I admit he did not stress it very much.  But he
>gave examples which illustrated the value of broad questioning.

True, and he gives the example of a _viva voce_ examination, which does 
imply testing with a certain skepticism.  On the other hand he talks about
5-minute tests, which seems to imply a much lower standard; this sort of
imprecision-- compounded when people besides Turing get into the fray--
is part of what bothers me about the test.

I wonder, by the way, if Searle ever read that sample dialog from Turing's
article... Searle's original CR paper was strongly influenced by Schank's work
on story understanding, and pumps its intuitions best in that context: one
may indeed suspect that Schank's story analyzers were some kind of trick.
But a free-flowing, well-informed discussion of sonnet-making, metaphors, 
and English literature?  I think Dennett was right: Searle really doesn't
want us to think too hard about how enormously complex a program that could
pass such a test would be.

>>But the test itself proceeds from philosophical ideas.  Turing says he
>>wants to draw a "fairly sharp line between the physical and the intellectual
>>capacities of a man."  That's a philosophical statement about what is
>>important about human cognition, and the test as proposed encourages a
>>line of inquiry based on that valuation.  
>
>Again, I guess we are reading him differently.  You interpret Turing
>as making a philosophical distinction.  I interpret him as making
>a pragmatic distinction between the problems he thought the computer
>could solve, and those it couldn't.

Wouldn't it be better to say, the problems he thought would be worth
solving and those not worth solving?  He mentions that it might be possible
to build a machine that enjoyed strawberries and cream, but that it would
be "idiotic".  This goes beyond pragmatism; he's saying that sensory 
experience is irrelevant to the problem of intelligence.  No doubt most
people who thought about intelligence at the time would have agreed,
but I think that this notion hasn't held up well.
