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From: markrose@spss.com (Mark Rosenfelder)
Subject: Re: Turing's Playful Games
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References: <3k4iub$p8n@oahu.cs.ucla.edu> <3kdeib$f03@ixnews2.ix.netc <cmckin.265.000930A7@mbnet.mb.ca> <3kgnfp$3j0@ixnews4.ix.netcom.com>
Date: Tue, 21 Mar 1995 18:20:37 GMT
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In article <3kgnfp$3j0@ixnews4.ix.netcom.com>,
Tom Hunscher <Aftrglow@ix.netcom.com> wrote:
>One would have to create a matrix of information sufficient to describe 
>an entire person. How could one do that? Suppose the person they chose 
>as the "model" for this Turing machine were you. They would have to ask 
>you every conceivable question. The number of questions you might be 
>asked would not be infinite, but it would be astronomical to the degree 
>that not even in a million lifetimes could you answer all of those 
>questions. Not only that, they would have to ask you the same question 
>at so many different time-slices, and catching you in every conceivable 
>mental state (just to determine how changes in these parameters might 
>affect your answers), that the Universe would come to an end before the 
>programming could even be done.

Why do you think this would be the only approach?  One could instead
create a general-purpose machine which operates in the world much as a
human being does.  It doesn't have to "model" a particular human being;
it answers most questions as a human does, based on its own experience.
For the specific differences between a robot and a human, it bluffs.

>Besides, there's a paradox of programming I can inject here. Let's 
>assume that you've developed an elegant solution to the problem outlined 
>in the prior photograph. Now the human asks, "You will flunk this 
>test unless you tell me, truthfully, something you've never told anyone 
>else before." What could the Turing machine do at this point? 

The machine can say whatever a human being can say in response to the
same question.

>Now, in the previous posting, you were making a big point of saying that 
>I couldn't *prove* I wasn't a Turing machine. In the same spirit, how 
>would Turing respond if I asked him to *prove* that his test really is a 
>test of artificial intelligence?

He'd laugh.  Read his original article, readily available in _The Mind's I_
by Hofstadter and Dennett.  In Turing's view, he was replacing a hopelessly
vague and unanswerable question ("what is intelligence") with a tractable
and well-defined one ("can a machine and a human be distinguished via
conversation alone").
