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>From: forbis@carson.u.washington.edu (Gary Forbis)
Subject: Re: Turing Indistinguishability is a Scientific Criterion
Message-ID: <1992Sep8.191620.14459@u.washington.edu>
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Organization: University of Washington, Seattle
References: <1992Sep6.200121.4383@Princeton.EDU>
Date: Tue, 8 Sep 1992 19:16:20 GMT
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Hi, 

I believe your central point is well taken but I wish to convince you that
a small side issue weakens the overall argument.

In article <1992Sep6.200121.4383@Princeton.EDU> harnad@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Stevan Harnad) writes:
>                  THE TURING TEST IS NOT A TRICK:
>      TURING INDISTINGUISHABILITY IS A SCIENTIFIC CRITERION

[much deleted]

>In my own papers I have tried to explain how trickery, deception and
>impersonation have nothing at all to do with the scientific import of
>Turing's criterion (Harnad 1989, 1991). AI is not a party game. The
>game was just a metaphor. The real point of the TT is that if we had a
>pen-pal whom we had corresponded with for a lifetime, we would never
>need to have seen him to infer that he had a mind. So if a machine
>pen-pal could do the same thing, it would be arbitrary to deny it had a
>mind just because it was a machine. That's all there is to it!

I agree with this and wish to support it.

>In fact, one of the reasons no computer has yet passed the TT may be that
>even successful TT capacity has to draw upon robotic capacity. A TT
>computer pen-pal alone could not even tell you the color of the flower
>you had enclosed with its birthday letter -- or indeed that you had
>enclosed a flower at all, unless you mention it in your letter. An
>infinity of possible interactions with the real world, interactions of
>which each of us is capable, is completely missing from the TT (and
>again, "tricks" have nothing to do with it).

I wish you would relax this criterion just a bit.  I think that while some
interaction with the real world is required, a mechanical pen-pal need not
have the ability to pass the TTT.

Consider...

Many of us have played video games at some time during our life.  These
video games have a pretty sophisticated display and very simple controls.
The experience of playing the video game involves very little outside the
game and the player.  If a TTPP had a buffer from the video display memory
of the video game and could output the control bits to the machine it could
gain knowledge of the game though the way it did so might in no way be
mistaken for TTT capable.

Likewise, a movie might be digitalized and processed by the TTPP in a way
completely different from the way a human might view a movie.

Computer animation is becoming ever more realistic though its production is
not real time, however, real time VR is not required by a TTPP whose processing
is not real time.

While the failure of a TTPP may be attributed to the failure of the model it
"experiences", to the extent that model approximates reality (as understood
by the person evaluating the TTPP,) the "experiencing" of the model would
seem sufficient.

--gary forbis@u.washington.edu


