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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: <3bu0gs$fff@sun4.bham.ac.uk> <D0Cry4.CCv@spss.com> <3bvurt$j0s@mp.cs.niu.edu>
Date: Tue, 6 Dec 1994 19:23:44 GMT
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In article <3bvurt$j0s@mp.cs.niu.edu>, Neil Rickert <rickert@cs.niu.edu> wrote:
>In <D0Cry4.CCv@spss.com> markrose@spss.com (Mark Rosenfelder) writes:
>>                                          The intuition here, I think, 
>>is that details of human biology aren't relevant to intelligence.
>>That's reasonable as far as it goes, but the implications are not IMHO 
>>fully grasped.  These intuitions show that we do have some specific
>>notions about what is or is not part of intelligence.  Why not make these
>>notions explicit, instead of maintaining that the question of what 
>>intelligence is cannot be answered?
>
>I think the situation is not quite as you have depicted it.  We
>maintain that the question of intelligence cannot easily be answered,
>because experience has repeatedly confounded our expectations.  At
>the time Turing proposed his test (1950, I think), there were some
>pretty good notions as to what counted as intelligence.  The IQ was
>considered a good measure of intelligence.  Skills such as chess
>playing, and solving calculus problems were seen of examples that
>illustrated what was most important about intelligence.
>
>We have gained some experience since then.  We no longer have as much
>respect for IQ tests.  We are not too sure about chess or calculus,
>because the computer does it well, but does it well in a way that
>does not seem to us to be intelligent.

I agree with your remarks here, so I'm not sure why you say that "the
situation is not quite as you have depicted it."  

>So, I think the question as to what constitutes intelligence really
>is more confusing today than it was when the TT was proposed.

Quite so; that's why I'm suggesting that, as a contribution to the debate
on what intelligence is, the TT is a relic of its time.  I think we can
agree, however, that it's still interesting as the description of a
significant milestone in AI-- that it would be very interesting to see
a program that does do well on the TT.
