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October 28, 2007: The buzz. The Erie Times (GoErie.com). "Zabaware, an Erie-based company that specializes in artificial intelligence technology, recently won first place for the 'most human' computer at the 17th annual Loebner Prize Competition for Artificial Intelligence in New York City."
>>> Turing Test, Chatbots (@ Natural Language Processing), Applications September 23, 2007: King Algorithm - An Oracle for Our Time, Part Man, Part Machine. By George Johnson. The New York Times. "Last week, when executives at MySpace told of new algorithms that will mine the information on users’ personal pages and summon targeted ads, the news hardly caused a stir. The idea of automating what used to be called judgment has gone from radical to commonplace. What is spreading through the Web is not exactly artificial intelligence. For all the research that has gone into cognitive and computer science, the brain’s most formidable algorithms -- those used to recognize images or sounds or understand language -- have eluded simulation. The alternative has been to incorporate people, with their special skills, as components of the Net. ... In the 1950s William Ross Ashby, a British psychiatrist and cyberneticist, anticipated something like this merger when he wrote about intelligence amplification -- human thinking leveraged by machines. But it is both kinds of intelligence, biological and electronic, that are being amplified. Unlike the grinning cyborgs envisioned by science fiction, the splicing is not between hardware and wetware but between software running on two different platforms. ... In his 1950 paper 'Computing Machinery and Intelligence,' Alan Turing foresaw a day when it would be hard to tell the difference between the responses of a computer and a human being. What he may not have envisioned is how thoroughly the boundary would blur." July/August 2007: Artificial Intelligence Is Lost in the Woods - A conscious mind will never be built out of software, argues a Yale University professor. By David Gelernter. Technology Review. "AI offers to figure out how thought works and to make that knowledge available to software designers. It even offers to deepen our understanding of the mind itself. Questions about software and the mind are central to cognitive science and philosophy. Few problems are more far-reaching or have more implications for our fundamental view of ourselves. The current debate centers on what I'll call a 'simulated conscious mind' versus a 'simulated unconscious intelligence.' We hope to learn whether computers make it possible to achieve one, both, or neither. ... To say that building a useful conscious mind is highly unlikely is not to say that AI has nothing worth doing. Consciousness has been a 'mystery' (as Turing called it) for thousands of years, but the mind holds other mysteries, too. Creativity is one of the most important; it's a brick wall that psychology and philosophy have been banging their heads against for a long time." June 19, 2007: The enigma of Alan Turing. By Richard Smith. Guardian Unlimited Arts blog. " Alan Turing is arguably the gay man who most changed the world in the 20th-century. It's thanks to him that you're reading this online - and in English, not German. He is widely acknowledged as the father of the computer and artificial intelligence. At Bletchley Park, the British intelligence HQ during the second world war, Turing's proto computer, the Bombe, cracked the Nazi's Enigma Code - helping to turn the tide in the allies' favour, and shortening the war by years. This week a new statue of Turing was unveiled at Bletchley Park. ... [M]y favourite tribute to Alan Turing may well be staring you in the face. Although never officially acknowledged, the Apple computer logo is often presumed to be not a reference to Adam and Eve, or even Sir Isaac Newton, but to the sad death of - and great debt owed to - Alan Turing." June 17, 2007: Game designers test the limits of artificial intelligence. By Scott Kirsner. The Boston Globe (boston.com). "'A lot of the most interesting work in artificial intelligence is being done by game developers,' says Bruce Blumberg, senior scientist at Blue Fang Games in Waltham, and formerly a professor at MIT's Media Lab. 'You have really bright kids who are dealing with problems they don't realize are insoluble. They're very motivated.' ... The challenge game designers are grappling with today is the same one that the British mathematician Alan Turing posed in 1950: writing software that could easily be mistaken for a human. 'You're always aiming to create something where the players won't be aware that they're dealing with an AI character,' says Michael Gesner, founder of Dragonfly Game Design in Westborough. One way to get there is by having humans 'train' the AI software. That's the approach that game designer Jeff Orkin, now a grad student at the Media Lab, is taking. With a project called The Restaurant Game.... [Brett] Close and others envision a hybrid, in which AI-driven characters help advance a story." May 29, 2007: Turing Test opera heads for Edinburgh fringe. By Ian Williams. vnunet.com. "Julian Wagstaff's opera is described as a story of 'lust, betrayal and academic rivalry' set in the world of artificial intelligence. ... It was inspired by a display in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology museum in Boston about English mathematician Alan Turing's test for human-level intelligence in a computer. ... Wagstaff is also co-author of the Guitarmaster music transcription software application." May 22, 2007: If I only had a brain - Androids, it seems, have appearance in the bag. But is their intelligence only skin-deep? By Peter Spinks. The Sydney Morning Herald. "Androids - robots that resemble humans - are increasingly popular exhibits at robotics conferences and trade shows worldwide. Unlike humanoids, which have two arms and two legs but look more like machines than people, androids are appealing because they seem so much like us. Enticed by research suggesting that people relate better to robots the more they resemble humans, roboticists are developing androids that one day might assist in aged care and eventually supersede servile robotic home helps, such as automated floor-crawling vacuum cleaners. 'The appearance of androids is important and we cannot ignore its effect in communication,' says Professor [Hiroshi] Ishiguro, a pioneer in android science, which combines cutting-edge research in robotics with slow but sure advances in cognitive psychology. 'My purpose is to understand humans by building androids . . . The practical use of androids is a kind of by-product.' Until recently, roboticists had not taken them seriously, regarding androids largely as electronic puppets. ... The inability of androids to communicate intelligently with humans is their biggest bugbear. They may speak in limited ways on specific topics, but cannot converse widely and certainly not on abstract subjects such as philosophy. In short, they're a long way from passing the legendary Turing test, described in 1950 by British mathematician Alan Turing. ... Despite androids' limited communication skills, their physical make-up and prowess - from skin to limbs, muscles to motion - are progressing in leaps and bounds. ... How might tomorrow's androids function? In years to come, roboticists expect that advanced systems - incorporating neural networks, genetic algorithms and fuzzy logic - will run on an assortment of very small, very fast processors, each performing a specific task in parallel and communicating simultaneously over lightning-fast networks. ... A promising area of research, already under way at some labs, involves equipping robots with mood-detection software and giving them rudimentary forms of social and emotional intelligence. This might help them match a person's emotional state. ... Q&A Indulging in some crystal-gazing, Peter Spinks asked Paul Davies what a hypothetical cutting-edge android - let's call it 'Jim' - might be capable of doing in 2045. Jim would be a sophisticated NASA machine to assist astronauts on missions to Mars. ... " May 20, 2007: ThisWeek on Philosophy Talk - Artificial Intelligence (radio broadcast: audio available online). With Ken Taylor and John Perry of Stanford University. KALW, 91.7 FM, San Francisco. "At least some versions of artificial intelligence are attempts not merely to model human intelligence, but to make computers and robots that exhibit it: that have thoughts, use language, and even have free will. Does this make sense? What would it show us about human thinking and consciousness? Join John and Ken [and guest, Marvin Minsky] as they uncover the philosophical issues raised by artificial intelligence." May 3, 2007: I Chat, Therefore I Am... Can a smooth-talking robot initiate good conversation, generate witty responses, and reveal profound thoughts? See what happens when two chatbots speak to each other. From Discover Magazine's special issue, The Brain: An Owner's Manual. "'Can machines think?' In 1950 mathematician Alan Turing pondered this question and invented an elegant game to answer it: Let a human chat via Teletype with a computer and another human; if the person can’t determine which is the computer, then it meets Turing’s standards for 'thinking.' In recent years Turing’s game has taken on a life of its own in cyberspace, thanks to artificial intelligence inventors worldwide who have produced dozens of 'chatbots' that anyone can talk to." April 20, 2007: Your Virtual Clone - Chatterbots from MyCyberTwin can respond to questions about you when you're not online. By Wade Roush. Technology Review. "Historians of artificial intelligence never talk about AI's progress in the 1960s without a reference to Eliza, the first virtual personality. Eliza was a text-chat program written in 1966 by MIT AI expert Joseph Weizenbaum to parody a Rogerian psychotherapist, largely by turning every statement by the 'patient' back into a question. ... Now there's a Web-based service that, in essence, lets you set up your own Eliza and train it to mimic your own personality. No one will be fooled into thinking it's you, but MyCyberTwin, launched earlier this month, does a decent job of acting as your stand-in or virtual public-relations agent when you're not reachable. ... Of course, academic and corporate AI experts have built more-advanced chatterbots in hopes of one day passing the so-called Turing test by convincing human judges that a machine is human. Since 1991, the annual Loebner Prize competition has offered $25,000 to the programmer of the first chatterbot that passes this test in a text-only conversation; so far, the prize has gone unclaimed. But Jabberwacky, the winner of the smaller $2,000 prize for the most human-seeming chatterbot in 2005 and 2006, is capable of deep and sometimes bizarre conversations that make a cybertwin sound rather vacant. ... 'People are spending a lot of time putting their personalities online,' [Liesl] Capper notes, whether through their MySpace pages, blogs, or avatars in virtual worlds such as Second Life." April 5, 2007: The Turing Test. A Computerworld TechCast. Topics covered in this podcast include The Turing Test, consciousness, and Searle's Chinese Room. April 2007: Learn Like A Human - Why Can't A Computer Be More Like A Brain? By Jeff Hawkins. IEEE Spectrum Online. "In some ways, the task has been wrongly posed right from the start. In 1950, Alan Turing, the computer pioneer behind the British code-breaking effort in World War II, proposed to reframe the problem of defining artificial intelligence as a challenge that has since been dubbed the Turing Test. Put simply, it asked whether a computer, hidden from view, could conduct a conversation in such a way that it would be indistinguishable from a human. So far, the answer has been a resounding no. Turing's behavioral framing of the problem has led researchers away from the most promising avenue of study: the human brain. It is clear to many people that the brain must work in ways that are very different from digital computers. To build intelligent machines, then, why not understand how the brain works, and then ask how we can replicate it? My colleagues and I have been pursuing that approach for several years." March 12, 2007: Will Machines Ever Be Conscious? A debate worthy of Alan Turing. By Gregory Mone. Technology Review. "The surprisingly funny discussion, held in a packed Stata Center auditorium in November, was staged in honor of the 70th anniversary of Alan Turing's paper 'On Computable Numbers,' which defined the limits of computer science. At one podium stood Ray Kurzweil '70--inventor, best-selling author, and stubborn artificial-intelligence optimist. His oppo:ent, David Gelernter, Yale University computer scientist, software pioneer, and occasional conservative columnist. Rodney Brooks, director of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and the event's host, kept the two on track while demonstrating a keen sense of geek humor." December 18, 2006: Conscious computing debated at MIT anniversary event - Will there ever be such a thing as artificial intelligence? That question was argued by two prominent US ICT industry figures recently. By Nancy Weil. Computerworld. "Inventor Ray Kurzweil and Yale University professor David Gelernter spent much of the session debating the definition of consciousness as they addressed the question, 'Are we limited to building super-intelligent, robotic "zombies," or will it be possible for us to build conscious, creative, even "spiritual" machines?' ... Kurzweil and Gelernter ... focused on how Turing’s test could be applied. Kurzweil’s position was that machines will, in fact, some day pass the Turing Test, because modelling of parts of the brain is already leading to the ability to replicate certain human functions in a machine. ... [Gelernter's] not buying it because logically any machine that is programmed to mimic human feelings, which are an aspect of consciousness, is programmed to lie because a machine cannot feel what a human feels." December 14, 2006: Robo-music gives musicians the jitters - Realtime has never played Broadway, but touring shows and 'Les Miz' in London use it. By Gregory M. Lamb. The Christian Science Monitor. "The Venice (Fla.) Little Theater has a tiny orchestra pit, with room for only a handful of players, and a modest budget. So when it mounts a big musical like "Beauty and the Beast," it brings in an electronic ringer. A laptop computer, loaded with a program called OrchEXTRA, serves as a 'virtual orchestra,' from strings to woodwinds, drums to horns, giving the music such a rich sound that audience members may wonder how a full Broadway orchestra fits into the tiny pit. ... Virtual orchestras - computer programs that can vary dynamics and tempo and follow the singers on stage and the music director's baton - are changing the music world. ... Music students benefit, too. ... [Christopher Raphael's] Music Plus One system, under development for 13 years, begins with a recording of an orchestra playing the piece, minus the solo. Computer programming allows the orchestral accompaniment to 'listen' to the soloist and follow. The program also uses predictive programming, based on the player's previous playing style and past rehearsals, to anticipate what to do next. ... Virtual orchestras have yet to pass the musical version of the 'Turing test' - Alan Turing's 70-year-old test for how to tell when a computer's artificial intelligence has become indistinguishable from that of human intelligence. ... Concern about virtual orchestras, [Vicky Smolik] says, is 'a big thing' with her union members, 'from New York to Los Angeles ... and everywhere in between.' ... Raphael, a former member of the musicians' union, says he's 'totally opposed to the musicians' union position' against the virtual enhancement of orchestras. 'Ultimately, what they do ends up giving the world less music, not more music,' he says." December 1, 2006: 'Deis sophomore to release book in Jan. By Dina Fine Maron. The Hoot (Brandeis University's Community Newspaper). "What is human consciousness? If humans are just a collection of biological machinery, then what makes us distinctive and where does free will factor into this? These complex questions and more were addressed by Brandeis sophomore Eliezer 'Elie' Sternberg, whose book, Are You a Machine?: The Brain, the Mind, And What It Means to Be Human, is being released in early January. After reading an article by philosopher John Searle on the possibility of building conscious machines in his junior year of high school, Sternberg was inspired to write a paper for his junior English class, which he then submitted to Prometheus publishing between his junior and senior years of high school. Prometheus expressed interest in his 20-page paper, but told him to expand on it. ... Teuber summarized the draft, stating that 'the various chapters address a number of topics in cognitive science, artificial intelligence, neuroscience, and philosophy of mind and range from "What is consciousness?" to discussions of John Searle's "Chinese Room Experiment," as well as the theories of Dan Dennett, David Chalmers, Bert Dreyfus, Paul Churchland, and others.'" November 29, 2006: Alan Turning to again be honored. United Press International. "Many U.S. scientists will meet at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology this week, honoring the 70th anniversary of Alan Turning's groundbreaking paper. The Thursday event -- titled 'Creativity: The Mind, Machines, and Mathematics' -- will be hosted by Rodney Brooks, director of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Turning's paper -- 'On Computable Numbers' -- is widely recognized as having laid a theoretical foundation for the computer evolution of the 20th century."
>>> Turing (@ Namesakes), Turing Test, Creativity, History, Philosophy, Events (@ Resources for Students) September 21, 2006: Chat program scoops the prize for being almost human. By Bobbie Johnson. The Guardian / Guardian Unlimited. "Her name is Joan; she is just a few years old and very talkative... and now she is officially the world's most human computer program. On Sunday, the computer-generated character scooped the prestigious Loebner prize for artificial intelligence, seeing off some of the world's most hi-tech creations in the process. Joan's maker, the British entrepreneur Rollo Carpenter, emerged victorious after a day of intense competition.... The test began well before computers were capable of such complex interaction. In 1950 the British mathematician Alan Turing, who famously helped crack German military codes during the second world war, asked how scientists would determine whether computers had successfully achieved truly artificial intelligence. His suggestion was that a computer which could give conversational responses that were indistinguishable from a human's could be said to be thinking for itself. ... 'We're still a long way off, but I think he's onto something,' said Duncan Graham-Rowe, one of the judges. But Carpenter is used to the long haul. The very first version of the program was written in 1982, and ran on a Sinclair ZX81, an 8-bit home computer which had a maximum of 16K of RAM." September 20, 2006: How To Be Human - Call centers might be able to teach "chat bots" a thing or two about passing the Turing Test. By Duncan Graham-Rowe. Technology Review. "If this year's winner of the Loebner Prize is on the right track, call-center data could be what's needed to achieve the ultimate goal of artificial intelligence (AI): creating a computer program smart enough to hold a natural conversation. A self-trained enthusiast with no formal academic background in AI, Rollo Carpenter created the winning program, which learns by analyzing its conversations with people as they 'chat' with it online. Regardless of the language, his program analyzes every utterance it witnesses, using what Carpenter calls contextual pattern-recognition techniques. Then, when a user asks the program a question, a database is combed for the best response, statistically speaking. This method may work for idle chit-chat. But if his bots--automated programs meant to perform specific tasks--are ever to be used in a serious commercial application or to pass the famous Turing Test for artificial intelligence, they will need a vast number of conversations, and computing power to match, says Carpenter. 'I need more data,' he says." September 18, 2006: Programmer wins £1,000 for most human creation. By Bobbie Johnson. The Guardian & Guardian Unlimited. "Joan is just a few years old and very talkative - and now she is officially the world's most human computer program. Yesterday the computer-generated character won the prestigious Loebner prize for artificial intelligence, earning £1,000 and a bronze medal for her British creator Rollo Carpenter, who also won last year with Joan's predecessor, George."
>>> Turing Test, Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning, Chatbots, Marketing & Customer Service, Applications, Competitions (@ Resources for Students) September 13, 2006: Editorial - Takeover bid. The Times of India. "Alan Turing, the British mathematician whose concepts in the early 1950s foreshadowed the modern-day digital computer, proposed a simple test to check for artificial intelligence. If a human judge, he said, engaged in a natural language text conversation with two other parties, one a human and the other a machine, and if the judge could not reliably tell which was which, then the machine would for all purposes have passed the test. As of 2006 no machine has managed to do that. But now a robot messager or chatbot has hit the Internet. It is so lifelike in its responses that many people have been fooled into thinking they're talking to a human being. ... This new George, unlike many other conversational programs, does not merely try to be logical but attempts to form relationships and frequently behave illogically in order to seem more alive. This is exactly what had been predicted by people ever since the industrial revolution introduced the possibility of creating mechanical human beings, and Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein based on a laboratory-made semi-human creature. The paranoia generated by such things has only gathered momentum since then...." July 28, 2006: The Man Who Knew Too Much, by David Leavitt. Sex, bugs and misread codes. Book review by Andrew Hodges. Independent Online Edition. "In 2000, the BBC's popularity poll put Alan Turing as the 21st great Briton. ... He led the deciphering of U-boat Enigma messages at Bletchley Park, while turning his theoretical computer of 1936 into the practical machine that dominates the modern world. He was also an increasingly open gay man who ended his life with a poisoned apple, two years after his arrest and trial in 1952. ... Thirty years ago, homosexuality came to be treated as a political issue analogous to race. Leavitt writes not just as a beneficiary of this liberating transformation, but as one fascinated with finding precursors. So, in discussing Turing's writing on artificial intelligence, his main point is that Turing asserted the equality of machines and minds as a sort of code for the demand for homosexual equality." July 25, 2006: AI set to exceed human brain power. CNN.com. "Mention Artificial Intelligence and most people are immediately transported into a distant future inspired by popular science fiction. Humankind either co-exists in blissful peace with subservient robots and conscious computers or faces a battle for survival against ultra-smart psychotic machines set on its destruction. Yet Artificial Intelligence (AI) has already been with us for half a century. The phrase was first coined by Professor John McCarthy for a conference on the subject at Dartmouth College in 1956. And while the AI fantasies imagined by science fiction writers such as Isaac Asimov, author of 'I, Robot,' may not have materialized, AI is already in more common usage than many of us might imagine. Nick Bostrom, Director of the Future of Humanity Institute at the UK's Oxford University, said that AI-inspired systems were already integral to many everyday technologies such as internet search engines, bank software for processing transactions and in medical diagnosis. ... In the short-term, developments in AI are likely to lead to more mundane technological improvements, such as more intuitive search engines and more sophisticated pattern recognition software. Yet Bostrom is confident that technological advances coupled with a growing understanding of the workings of the human brain could enable machines to exceed human brain power within a couple of decades." July 17, 2006: AI Reaches the Golden Years. By David Cohn. Wired News. "Artificial intelligence is 50 years old this summer, and while computers can beat the world's best chess players, we still can't get them to think like a 4-year-old. This week in Boston, some of the field's leading practitioners are gathering to examine this most ambitious of computer research fields, which at once has managed to exceed, and fall short of, our grandest expectations. 'Artificial intelligence has accomplished more than people realize,' said futurist Ray Kurzweil. 'It permeates our economic infrastructure. Every time you place a cell phone call, send an e-mail, AI programs are directing information.' ... AI technology is used by banks to police transactions for fraud, by cell phone companies for voice recognition, and by search engines to scour the web and organize data. Beyond business, programs like Artificial Intelligence in Medicine help doctors diagnose and treat patients, while vision-recognition programs scan beaches and pools and alert lifeguards to signs of drowning. ... Today, AI is still in its infancy, making it difficult to tell just what to expect in the future. 'It took more than 100 years between Mendel and deciphering the genetic code, and even that wasn't the end of genetics,' said Stanford's [John] McCarthy. Keeping things in perspective, the conference this week isn't aimed at figuring out how to reach singularity but will present research papers from leaders in the field of AI on practical applications and breakthroughs. There will also be robot competitions and exhibitions, including a robot poker tournament that aspires to eventually produce a program capable of beating the world's best Texas Hold 'Em players." July 2006: The Search for Artificial Intelligence - For 50 years the finest minds have been telling computers what to do. What they haven't been able to instill in them is common sense. By Tom Bethell. The American Spectator (subscription req'd). "In a semi-official way, the search for artificial intelligence began 50 years ago. In the summer of 1956, a two-month conference at Dartmouth College set out to explore 'the conjecture that every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it.' Computers could do what the mind does, in other words. An attempt would be made 'to find how to make machines use language, form abstractions and concepts, solve kinds of problems now reserved for humans, and improve themselves.' The four authors of the grant proposal added -- optimistically it turned out: 'We think that a significant advance can be made in one or more of these problems if a carefully selected group of scientists work on it together for a summer.' The Rockefeller Foundation put up the money. The conjecture that machines could be built with the ability to think had been made by the British mathematician Alan Turing in the 1930s. By the end of the 20th century, he believed, 'one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted.' In 1950 he devised what became known as the Turing test. If a human behind a screen cannot distinguish human from machine responses, then the machine must be considered intelligent. Fifty years after the Dartmouth conference, the computer science people are still working on these problems. Computers have not yet passed the Turing test. A 'significant advance' has been made in solving some problems 'now reserved for humans.' But the advance belongs in the realm of what is called 'applied' artificial intelligence. Computers can do useful things like multiplication and division, and they are also very good at chess. An IBM program beat the world chess champion. As to machines forming abstractions on their own, there has been no progress. ... In the past half century, an important distinction has emerged: between 'strong' and 'weak' AI. It divides what is often called 'cognitive' and 'applied' artificial intelligence. It distinguishes between computers on the one hand actually knowing and thinking -- the still unattained goal of 'strong' AI; and on the other hand performing a programmed sequence of tasks in order to achieve a well-defined goal -- 'applied' AI." June 22, 2006: Can you read - If so, you're human - probably. As computers get better at text tests, new Web site defenses are sought. By Crayton Harrison. The Dallas Morning News. "Computers are better than humans at a lot of complex calculations, but we still have them beat on some small problems. That's why a very simple test has protected some of the world's biggest Web sites for so long. ... But the defenses are finally crumbling. Computer scientists are working on replacements for the test, knowing that computers are learning to read even the messiest scribbles. ... Researchers aren't trying to beat the distorted-letter tests to ambush Web sites, of course. They're trying to make computers better at recognizing text. But if computer scientists can figure out how to beat the tests, hackers won't be far behind. The next wave of tests will have to present problems that computer researchers and cybercriminals have barely begun to tackle with artificial intelligence. Carnegie Mellon's research team trademarked a name for these computer-or-human tests: Captcha. It's an acronym that stands for 'Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.'" June 18, 2006: Turing and the IT factor. Peter Conrad's review of The Man Who Knew Too Much: Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer, by David Leavitt. Guardian Unlimited Books - Observer review. "Every time I open the electronic book in which I'm writing this review, I feel grateful to Alan Turing and also sorry for him. On the screen, an apple with a chunk bitten out of it glimmers into view: the logo proudly recalls Turing's achievement and miserably commemorates his end. Man, enticed by a woman, has always wanted to know too much, which is why Adam plucked the apple from the tree of knowledge. Turing's work on artificial intelligence, which enabled him to decrypt German military messages during the Second World War, then pressed him to design and help build a machine that could think for itself, advanced the intellectual rebellion that began in Eden." June 8, 2006: This Day in History. Computer History Museum. "June 8, 1954: Computer Pioneer Alan Turing Found Dead. 'Computer pioneer Alan Turing is found dead at age 42, of an apparent suicide. ...'" May 31, 2006: Codes on Sites 'Captcha' Anger of Web Users. By David Kesmodel. The Wall Street Journal. "Dave Simmer is a computer-savvy graphic designer. Yet when he surfs the Internet, he often gets stumped by the distorted jumbles of letters and numbers that some Web sites ask users to retype to gain access. ... The visually impaired have long decried these codes, which protect sites such as Yahoo.com and Ticketmaster.com from computer programs that create scores of email accounts for spammers or buy hundreds of concert tickets for scalpers ... Captcha is an acronym for Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart. Computer scientists at Carnegie Mellon University coined the term in 2000 to describe codes they created to help Internet giant Yahoo Inc. thwart a spam problem. 'Turing' refers to Alan Turing, a mathematician famous for his codebreaking work during World War II and, later, as a pioneer in artificial intelligence. In 1950, Turing wrote a paper that proposed a test in which a person in one room would ask questions of both a human and a computer in another to try to determine which of the respondents was human. If the judge couldn't tell which was which, the computer could be said to be able to think." May 11, 2006: Fuzzy maths - In a few short years, Google has turned from a simple and popular company into a complicated and controversial one. The Economist. "The breakthrough that made their search engine so popular was the realisation that the chaos of the internet had an implicit mathematical order. By counting, weighting and calculating the link structures between web pages, Messrs [Larry] Page and [Sergey] Brin were able to return search results more relevant than those of any other search engine. ... Since its stockmarket debut, however, Google has been adding new and often quite different products.... At a maximum, the transformation goes quite a bit further. George Dyson, a futurist who has spent time at Google, thinks that the company ultimately intends to link all these digital synapses created by its users into what H.G. Wells, a British science-fiction writer, once called the 'world brain'. Google, Mr Dyson thinks, wants to fulfil the geeks' dream of creating 'artificial intelligence'. Passing the so-called 'Turing test', created by Alan Turing, a British mathematician, to determine whether a machine can be said to be able to think, would be the ultimate reward. But many who deal with Google in their daily lives are getting fed up with such grandiose notions." April 14, 2006: Promise of AI not so bright. By Fred Reed. The Washington Times. "A curious technology that was thought to have great promise but didn't go anywhere -- well, sort of didn't -- is artificial intelligence, or AI. What happened? Why don't we have computers that talk to us about the meaning of art? Is AI nonsense? No, if you are reasonable about it. ... A problem that proponents of AI regularly face is this: When we know how a machine does something 'intelligent,' it ceases to be regarded as intelligent. If I beat the world's chess champion, I'd be regarded as highly bright." April 2006: Electric Thoughts? The latest computer designs draw inspiration from human neural networks. But will machines ever really think? By Yvonne Raley. Scientific American Mind. "[R]ecent technological advances are narrowing the gap between human brains and circuitry. At Stanford University, bioengineers are replicating the complicated parallel processing of neural networks on microchips. Another development--a robot named Darwin VII--has a camera and a set of metal jaws so that it can interact with its environment and learn, the way juvenile animals do. Researchers at the Neurosciences Institute in La Jolla, Calif., modeled Darwin's brain on rat and ape brains. The developments raise a natural question: If computer processing eventually apes nature's neural networks, will cold silicon ever be truly able to think? And how will we judge whether it does? More than 50 years ago British mathematician and philosopher Alan Turing invented an ingenious strategy to address this question, and the pursuit of this strategy has taught science a great deal about designing artificial intelligence, a field now known as AI. At the same time, it has shed some light on human cognition. ... [T]he Chinese Room Argument--was developed by philosopher John Searle of the University of California, Berkeley, to show that a computer can pass the Turing Test without ever understanding the meaning of any of the words it uses. ... [Stevan Harnad of the University of Southampton] proposes a revised Turing Test, which he calls the Robotic Turing Test. To merit the label 'thinking,' a machine would have to pass the Turing Test and be connected to the outside world. Interestingly, this addition captures one of Turing's own observations: a machine, he wrote in a 1948 report, should be allowed to 'roam the countryside' so that it would be able to 'have a chance of finding things out for itself.'" March 5, 2006: Artificial intelligence and globalisation. By Kenneth Rogoff. Daily Times / also available from The Korea Herald (March 7, 2006). "Today’s conventional wisdom is that the rise of India and China will be the single biggest factor driving global jobs and wages over the twenty-first century. ... But I wonder whether, even within the next few decades, another factor will influence our work lives even more: the exponential rise of applications of artificial intelligence. My portal to the world of artificial intelligence is a narrow one, the more than 500-year-old game of chess. You may not care a whit about chess, long regarded as the ultimate intellectual sport. But the stunning developments coming out of the chess world during the past decade should still command your attention. Chess has long been the centerpiece of research in artificial intelligence. ... The 'Turing test' is the holy grail of artificial intelligence research. Well, for me, a chess game is a conversation of sorts. From my perspective, today’s off-the-shelf computer programs come awfully close to meeting Turing’s test. Over the course of a small number of games on the Internet, I could not easily tell the difference. ... [T]he vast body of evidence suggests that technological changes were a much bigger driver in global wage patterns than trade. ..." February 6, 2006 : Code-Breaker - The life and death of Alan Turing. Jim Holt's review of David Leavitt’s, "The Man Who Knew Too Much: Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer" (Norton/Atlas). The New Yorker. "With the backing of John Maynard Keynes, he was elected a Fellow of King’s College in 1935, at the age of twenty-two. ... That spring, attending lectures in the foundations of mathematics, he was introduced to a deep and unresolved matter known as the 'decision problem.' A few months later, during one of his habitual runs, he lay down in a meadow and conceived a sort of abstract machine that settled it in an unexpected way. The decision problem asks, in essence, whether reasoning can be reduced to computation. That was the dream of the seventeenth-century philosopher Gottfried von Leibniz, who imagined a calculus of reason that would permit disagreements to be resolved by taking pen in hand and saying, Calculemus --- 'Let us calculate.' Suppose, that is, you have a set of premises and a putative conclusion. Is there some automatic procedure for deciding whether the former entails the latter? ... By ruthlessly paring away inessential details, he arrived at an idealized machine that, he was convinced, captured the essence of the process. The machine was somewhat homely in conception: it consists of an unending tape divided into squares (rather like an infinite strip of toilet paper). Over this tape a little scanner travels back and forth, one square at a time, writing and erasing 0’s and 1’s. ... Turing was able to do some amazing things with his abstract devices, which soon became known as 'Turing machines.' ... The boldest idea to emerge from Turing’s analysis was that of a universal Turing machine: one that, when furnished with the number describing the mechanism of any particular Turing machine, would perfectly mimic its behavior. In effect, the 'hardware' of a special-purpose computer could be translated into 'software' and then entered like data into the universal machine, where it would be run as a program.... At Princeton, Turing took the first steps toward building a working model of his imaginary computer, pondering how to realize its logical design in a network of relay-operated switches; he even managed to get into a machine shop in the physics department and construct some of the relays himself. In addition to his studies with [Alonzo] Church, he also had dealings with the formidable John von Neumann, who would later be credited with innovations in computer architecture that Turing himself had pioneered. ... Back at Cambridge, he became a regular at Ludwig Wittgenstein’s seminar on the foundations of mathematics. ... When Turing arrived at Bletchley Park, no work was being done on the naval Enigma, which many considered to be unbreakable. Indeed, it has been said, there were only two people who thought the Enigma could be broken: Frank Birch, the head of Bletchley’s naval-intelligence division, because it had to be broken; and Alan Turing, because it was an interesting problem. ... By 1942, Turing had mastered most of the theoretical problems posed by the Enigma. Now that the United States was ready to throw its vast resources into the code-breaking effort, he was dispatched as a liaison to Washington, where he helped the Americans get their own Bombe-making and Enigma-monitoring under way. Then he headed to New York, where he was to work on another top-secret project, involving the encryption of speech, at Bell Laboratories, which were then situated near the piers in Greenwich Village. While at Bell Labs, he became engrossed with a question that came to occupy his postwar work: was it possible to build an artificial brain?" February 2006: A Tour of Turing - The life and death of Alan Turing continue to offer up mysteries. Andrew Hodges' review of "The Man Who Knew Too Much: Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer," by David Leavitt [The Great Discoveries Series. W. W. Norton, 2005]. Scientific American. "Twenty-five years ago the word 'Turing' tingled with mystery for the few who knew it. Readers of Douglas Hofstadter learned that Alan Turing belonged with Gödel in exploring minds and logic and knew also of 'the Turing test' for artificial intelligence. But others were aware of Turing as a British figure, a Cambridge mathematician, emerging in connection with the huge World War II operation to break the Enigma ciphers. His crucial importance in the battle of the Atlantic was still shrouded by state secrecy. In fact, it was only after this secrecy was lifted that he began to be acknowledged for another great contribution--his role in the origin of the computer." November 25 - December 1, 2005: Pass the Paddles - Man's Best Friend. Nintendogs - machines, metaphysics, and you. By Joshuah Bearman. LA Weekly. "Computers were still huge assemblies of vacuum tubes and transistors when the German-Jewish émigré and computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum published a paper called 'ELIZA --- A Computer Program for the Study of Natural Language Communication between Man and Machine,' in Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery 9. It was 1966, and Weizenbaum programmed ELIZA to simulate the 'active listening' psychoanalytical strategies of the Rogerian therapy in vogue at the time. ... ELIZA struck a deep chord: It was the first simulated intelligence, and already presented the possibility of people having an emotional relationship with a computer. That raised the issue, since taken up by computer scientists and philosophers and cyberpunk novelists and eager post-humanists: What do such relationships mean? ... Today, the saga further unfolds with the Nintendogs phenomenon. That,s a form of computer intelligence running on that experimental platform, the Nintendo DS, a hand-held game system far less advanced than the theoretical HAL 9000 but still powerful enough to let you walk around with a bunch of simulated beings living in your pocket. Yes: virtual pets. ... Nintendogs go a long way toward satisfying a sort of canine Turing test: If they look and act enough like dogs, then at a simple cognitive level, they're a pretty good substitute. ... Nintendogs moves beyond the interpersonal, and instead facilitates bonding with the software itself." September 20, 2005: Brit's bot chats way to AI medal. BBC News. "A British computer chat program, called George, has won an international prize for holding the most convincingly human-like conversation. George and its creator Rollo Carpenter competed against three other talkative bot finalists in New York. Reigning three-time winner, Alice, came fourth in this year's Loebner Prize. The competition is based on the Turing Test, which suggests computers could be seen as 'intelligent' if their chat was indistinguishable from humans. ... Mr Carpenter told the BBC News website that the win was a first for such a learning type of AI (Artificial Intelligence). ... George is a 'character' which has learned its conversation skills from the interactions it has had with human visitors to the Jabberwacky website."
>>> Turing Test, Chatbots (@ Natural Language Processing), Machine Learning, Competitions (@ Resources for Students) August 14, 2005: All aboard for a journey to the wild side. Web site reviews by Robbie Hudson. Sunday Times & Times Online. "The English mathematician Alan Turing is credited as the father of computer science, and it was he who famously proposed using two-way conversation with a computer to test artificial intelligence. At Simon Laven's site [www.simonlaven.com], you can find dozens of online 'chatterbots' ...." August 13, 2005 : Spotting the bots with brains. New Scientist (Issue 2512, page 27). "How do you tell just how smart your robot is? Simple: give it a universal IQ test. ... Shane Legg and Marcus Hutter at the Swiss Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Manno-Lugano have drafted an alternative test that will allow the intelligence of vision systems, robots, natural language processing programs or trading agents to be compared and contrasted despite their broad and disparate functions. Although there is no consensus on what exactly human intelligence is, most views appear to cluster around the idea that it hinges on a general ability to achieve goals in a wide range of environments, says Legg. The same can be applied to an AI system...."
>>> Nature of Intelligence, AI Overview, Cognitive Science, Turing Test July 2005: The Other Turing Test. By Clive Thompson. Wired (Issue 13.07). "Everyone has heard of the Turing test, where you chat with a human and a computer and try to figure out which is which. But few know that this is not the only scenario Alan Turing proposed in his famous 1950 paper 'Computing Machinery and Intelligence.' In it, he suggested an 'imitation game,' which plays like 20 Questions for transsexuals: first a man and then a computer pose as female, and the interrogator tries to distinguish them from a real woman. Scientists studying artificial intelligence have long argued over the meaning of this gender-bending experiment...." June 5, 2005: Play It Again, Vladimir (via Computer). By Anne Midgette. The New York Times (registration req'd). "This is the new world of computer music. In its infancy, way back in the 1960's, the goal was to use digital technology to create new sounds and new musical forms. Today scientists around the world are turning computers on human performance, seeking to quantify an element once thought to be intangible: the expressivity of a human artist. ... The reactions demonstrate a basic difficulty with mechanical reproduction of music: there is a subjective element involved in determining if it works. The final criterion for any such reproduction is the rather imprecise 'Turing test' of artificial intelligence: that is, whether it can make the listener think he or she is hearing a person rather than a machine. At the Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence, a group of leading researchers known as the Machine Learning, Data Mining and Intelligent Music Processing Group are trying to pinpoint just what it is that fools the ear. Led by Gerhard Widmer, they are looking at everything from improving the way computers 'hear' music to isolating the elements of individual performance style, as well as creating graphs and animations to illustrate different pianists' interpretations of the same passage of music. In a 2003 paper, 'In Search of the Horowitz Factor,' Dr. Widmer and his team described giving the computer 13 recordings of Mozart piano sonatas, played into a Bösendorfer Disklavier by the pianist Roland Batik, to see if they could use the computer to determine rules that described the pianist's interpretive choices. ... [T]here's still the thorny matter of how to get data from an audio recording into the computer. It's a question not just of having the computer play back a CD, but of translating the music into a language the computer can understand. A computer, by itself, can't recognize the difference between a note of music and a cough." May 22, 2005: Wagering on reason - A website tries to replace the crystal ball with hard science. By Peter Calamai. The Toronto Star (registration req'd.). "[Peter] Schwartz, a futurist and co-founder of the Global Business Network, made his prediction about humanity's increased longevity when Long Bets opened for business three years ago. In keeping with the website's philosophy, the prophecy had to be at least two years into the future, be societally or scientifically important, and backed by a minimum wager of $200 (US). What really distinguishes these from casual bets, however, is that bettors must explain online the reasoning behind their choices. ... [Mitch] Kapor and [Ray] Kurzweil are up against one another in the site's biggest wager, a $20,000 argument about whether a computer will be able to impersonate human intelligence well enough by 2029 to fool a human judge (the Turing Test)." April 18, 2005: World's First Original Imitation Game. News release A.L.I.C.E. Artificial Intelligence Foundation (subject to revision). "Turing's Original Imitation Game was played for the first time ever at Simon's Rock College of Bard in Great Barrington, MA on Saturday, April 16, 2005. The experiment was organized by Cameo Wood, Melissa Leventhal and Allyson Sgro. Dr. Wallace of the A. I. Foundation was invited to speak after the event and to assist with the chat bot technology." April 16, 2005: Captcha the Puzzle. Math Trek column by Ivars Peterson. Science News Online ( Vol. 167, No. 16). "Computers can do all sorts of amazing things, from searching the Web at an incredible rate to playing chess at a grandmaster level. Yet some tasks that are easy for people to perform remain remarkably difficult for computers. For example, computer programs have a hard time reading distorted text or deciphering images. In the last few years, computer scientists have worked out an ingenious security scheme that takes advantage of such a mismatch. ... It's an intriguing way of distinguishing between the actions of a computer program and those of a person. ... Such a puzzle is known as a CAPTCHA. The word was coined by Luis von Ahn, Manel Blum, and Nicholas J. Hopper of Carnegie Mellon University and John Langford of IBM. It stands for 'Completely Automated Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart.' ... Then there's the challenge of breaking CAPTCHAs. How easily can they be solved by a computer?" March 15, 2005: Sentient machines will raise human questions. Opinion by Tyson Durst. The Gateway (Volume XCIV, Issue 39). "To make this assumption and rule out the possibility that sentient machines will ever be created would be foolish and narrow-minded; so many of the technologies that we take for granted were once thought impossible. The race to build machines that possess consciousness is already underway -- one could argue that it’s been underway since people first imagined artificial life. But today’s scientists are looking at the data and theories that are available, re-examining the logic and flaws of this information and thinking about how we, as humans, think. For example, take the famous Turing test, proposed by Alan Turing in 1950. ... Scientists who are serious about research and development of true artificial intelligence, though, are very much interested in the internal processes going on in a computer. An example would be the simple action of walking.... For now, though, the days of computers that attain consciousness are still far off, although far from impossible. Before we will be able to finally build machines that think as we do, we will first have to figure out just how we think. ... A new field of science will likely be born -- 'artificial neuroscience' -- that will deal with the application of human consciousness within the construct of a computer, a 'ghost in the shell,' if you will." December 13, 2004: No End To His Imagination. By Ken Spencer Brown. Investor's Business Daily (reg. req'd.). "Imagination should have no limits. And for Alan Turing, it didn't. By refusing to envision only what was strictly practical, he expanded the bounds of what was possible. ... Turing's most advanced ideas became a foundation for computer science with the dawning of the digital age he'd envisioned. If things like software code, cryptography and artificial intelligence leave you scratching your head, just imagine wrestling with those concepts decades before the invention of the computer. ... Normally gentle in speech, Turing would defend his friends' views intensely when they were challenged. They often inspired him, too. The death of a close schoolmate in February 1930 sparked Turing's first published thoughts in metaphysics. In letters to the friend's mother, Turing pondered the connection between the human mind and the brain. These ideas sparked his thinking on artificial intelligence, which tries to model the human brain and the thought process. ... Turing described the functions of a machine that could solve any problem stated as a mathematical algorithm. Now known as a Turing machine, the theoretical device was the first to conceive of a general-use device that could store data and instructions and be programmed for lots of different math problems. ... Despite his work in artificial intelligence, Turing was no robot. He had a deep concern for other people." November 26, 2004: Man and machine - Part 1: the quest for mechanical man. By Dheera Sujan. Radio Netherlands. "In her book Edison's Eve: A Magical History of the Quest for Mechanical Life, Gaby Wood documents the long history of humanity's fascination with mechanical representations of itself. And she poses the question - what do we want from a machine that simulates us? 'Is it supposed to be as close as possible to a human being, or to improve on that, and become superhuman? In the quest for mechanical perfection, does perfection mean infallibility (as in the computer), or innocence (as in the child)?' These questions have been around since the Enlightenment and the dawn of the age of machines; now researchers in the field of Artificial Intelligence are returning to them as they gain renewed relevance. ... At what pointpoint does a humanoid machine achieve personhood? Dr [Anne] Foerst's search for an answer to this question has led her through a philosophical maze that has forced her to examine her own ideas on what it means to be alive. ... Fear has always been part of the fascination we have for the idea of reproducing ourselves mechanically. According to Dr Foerst, however, that won't happen if we take responsibility for our creation. After all, Dr Frankenstein didn't create a monster; the creature (never dignified with a name) only became a monster when he was rejected by his creator and the rest of mankind." You can listen to the broadcast via a link on the page. November 18, 2004: Sex, lies and AI - A Hong Kong-based company's creation of a virtual girlfriend raises philosophical questions about the curious evolution of artificial intelligence. By Alex Lo. South China Morning Post (subscription req'd.). [This article can also be found in Artificial Life, Inc.'s news collection.] "The German-born polymath-philosopher, mathematician, computer scientist, author and businessman brooks no criticism of his cyber-girlfriend, who will be officially launched at the 3G World Congress and Exhibition at the Convention Centre today. By now, you have probably heard all about Vivienne, with whom you can have a cyber-affair, sans sex, in a hyper-real graphic environment on your 3G phone. 'I don't like it when people say, 'Oh it's just a dumb chatter bot. It doesn't really understand anything and will never pass the Turing test',' Mr [Eberhard] Schoneburg says. (The Turing test decrees a computer program must be considered intelligent if, after interacting with it over a period of time, you cannot tell if you are dealing with a computer or a human.) 'Artificial Intelligence has been criticised since day one,' Mr Schoneburg continues, "mostly because of incompetent public writers who have collected their AI knowledge from reading three books ... who have no clue what they are writing about, and from tonnes of bad science fiction, where AI-driven robots kill and eat people... it's just horrifying how dumb people can be. 'Why is it that reporters always have to find a negative edge? The V-Girl is 'not just a chat bot with high resolution graphics'. We have tried - within the boundaries of the current technical AI possibilities - to simulate life-like behaviour as much as possible. That's the edge - the chatting is just one small component of it.' ... Eliza, Parry and Racter are the precursors of so-called chat bots. ... There are also expert systems, some of which have chat-bot features, which can answer most questions you want to know in a specific field." October 17, 2004: Stump
the robot - Are you smarter than these Web sites? Log on and
find out. By David Andrukonis. USA Weekend Magazine. "Two
sites in particular make a strong case that simple computer programs
can mimic (or very nearly mimic) the behavior of humans. For example,
the age-old game of idea identification through systematic elimination
-- 20 Questions -- has been all but mastered by a computer. The
Web site 20q.net, an experiment in artificial intelligence....
Another A.I. site, Alicebot.org, features an award-winning robotic
being that converses with you." October 13, 2004: Can you prove you're not a machine? By
Christine Boese. CNN.ocm. "I've been thinking about something called the 'Turing Tes'" lately
because some of my personal e-mail has come back undeliverable. Evidently
the servers, in an attempt to screen out machine-generated spam,
think that my e-mail is spam, too. ... Alan M. Turing was a mathematician
and a co-founder of computer science and cryptography. He developed
the Turing Test. Turing postulated that in developing a thinking
machine or 'artificial intelligence,' the machine shouldn't have
to duplicate human thinking processes exactly. All that should be
required of a thinking machine is that it be able to 'pass' as a
human." October 9, 2004: The
Pleming Test for intelligence. Robert Pleming's letter to the
editor. New Scientist Magazine. "In response to John Crocker's
challenge, I can offer something better than the Turing test (21
August, p 22). Two copies of the same artificial intelligence program
are made to converse with each other. The result can evolve in
several ways...." September 20, 2004: Alice
chatbot wins for third time - People can chat with Alice on the
web A computer chat program called Alice has won a prestigious prize
for human-like conversation for the third time. BBC News. "It
was judged to be chattiest bot out of the four finalists in the Loebner
Prize for artificial intelligence held in New York on Sunday. British
hopeful, Jabberwacky, came second in the annual competition. The
event is based on the Turing Test, which suggests computers could
be seen as intelligent if their chat was indistinguishable from those
of humans."
September 18, 2004: Say
hello to Jabberwacky, our best 'human' computer. By Charles Arthur.
The Independent. " A computer program will attempt to pull off
the ultimate con trick tomorrow: fooling an adult into believing it
is human - and in doing so claim the greatest prize in artificial intelligence.
The program in question - called Jabberwacky - started life in 1982
on a Sinclair home computer. Written by Rollo Carpenter, a British computer
consultant, it is one of four that have been picked by the millionaire
Hugh Loebner to take part in the annual Loebner Prize contest, where
computer programs try to pass the 'Turing Test'. That challenge, originally
set by the British mathematician Alan Turing in 1950, is straightforward.
In a text conversation with no fixed topic a human should be unable
to tell whether they are communicating with another person or a computer.
If successful, the machine would have passed at least one of the requirements
to be described as 'thinking' - though Turing himself said it would
be better described as 'imitation'." September 10, 2004: Beware
of Bots Bearing Messages. By Daniel Terdiman. Wired News. "If
you get an instant message from someone with an unfamiliar screen
name
in the near future, you might want to think twice before getting
emotionally invested in the conversation. That's because you may
be talking with
Chatting AIM Bot , a free service that lets anyone play a devious
practical joke on a friend, in which an artificially intelligent
AOL instant message,
or AIM, bot carries on an innocuous, 10-minute conversation before
finally lowering the boom and informing the unwitting human at the
other end
they've been had. 'People fall for it all the time,' said Greg Paradee,
a Chatting AIM Bot, or CAB, fan. 'It acts so much like a real human,
sometimes it's hard not to fall for it. The bot ... keeps conversation
going with normal, everyday questions, so people answer those thinking
it's a real person.'" August 24, 2004: Can
3G users develop feelings for their virtual playmates? Cyber-affair
creators say program can probe frontiers of artificial intelligence.
By Alex Lo. South China Morning Post (subscription req'd.). "[Eberhard
Schoneburg, chief executive officer of Artificial Life], a former computer
science professor, referred to the new dating game as a version of the
Turing Test, the cornerstone of artificial intelligence. The test is
a game in which a human being and a computer are questioned by an interrogator
who does not know which is which. Some theorists argue that if the interrogator
cannot distinguish between them after some time, it would be reasonable
to call the computer intelligent. 'Our Virtual Girlfriend is similar
to the Turing Test,' said Mr Schoneburg. The player communicates with
a virtual character through his mobile phone, not exactly knowing who
will respond to his chats ... The player does not know whether the response
he or she receives comes from a piece of software - or from one of our
human employees. And this is part of the fun of our game.'" July 28, 2004: Amplified
Intelligence - The AI Problem. Interview with Ken Ford. Astrobiology
Magazine. "Astrobiology Magazine (AM): The IMHC [Interdisciplinary
Study of Human & Machine Cognition] research agenda broadly seems to
cover robotics, cognition and simulations. Are there parts of machine
intelligence that your research institute doesn't cover today, but that
you see as growth areas? Ken Ford (KF): Don't forget that second
letter is 'H'. Although a lot of our research could be categorized as
AI, and five of our researchers are AAAI (American Association for Artificial
Intelligence) Fellows, IHMC is not a traditional machine intelligence
laboratory. The focus and theme of our research is what has become known
as human-centered computing which, in a nutshell, is about fitting technology
to people instead of fitting people to technology. The human is part
of the system, and it is the performance of the whole system, including
the human, that we are interested in. This requires that machines should
be designed to fit us physically, cognitively, and perhaps even socially.
We think of AI as meaning 'Amplified Intelligence.' The interesting
thing is that many traditional AI technologies in fact are being used
in just this way. We like to refer to it as building cognitive prostheses,
computational systems that leverage and extend human intellectual capacities,
just as eyeglasses are a kind of ocular prosthesis. Building cognitive
prostheses is fundamentally different from AI's traditional Turing Test
ambitions -- it doesn't set out to imitate human abilities, but to extend
them. ... AM: In your opinion, how well do the machine intelligence
problems (like navigation, data-mining, or simulations with agents)
map to the basic computer science [CS] problem of efficient 'search'?
KF: Wow, efficient search is a 'basic computer science problem'?
Not long ago, search was being suggested as a defining characteristic
of AI to distinguish it from 'mainstream' CS. But to return to the question:
search is certainly a central technique in AI, but the search spaces
arising in AI are often impossibly huge, and a more interesting aspect
is not so much how to search them efficiently as how to re-cast problems
so that the search space itself is reduced in size. Searching is what
you do when you can't think of anything smarter." July 13, 2004: The
rise of 'Digital People.'- Tales about artificial beings have sparked
fascination and fear for centuries; now the tales are turning into reality.
Excerpt from "Digital People: From Bionic Humans to Androids" by Sidney
Perkowitz, the Charles Howard Candler professor of physics at Emory
University. MSNBC Science News. "There is, however, considerable
debate about the possibility of achieving the centerpiece of a complete
artificial being, artificial intelligence arising from a humanly constructed
brain that functions like a natural human one. Could such a creation
operate intelligently in the real world? Could it be truly self-directed?
And could it be consciously aware of its own internal state, as we are?
These deep questions might never be entirely settled. We hardly know
ourselves if we are creatures of free will, and consciousness remains
a complex phenomenon, remarkably resistant to scientific definition
and analysis. One attraction of the study of artificial creatures is
the light it focuses on us: To create artificial minds and bodies, we
must first better understand ourselves. While consciousness in a robot
is intriguing to discuss, many researchers believe it is not a prerequisite
for an effective artificial being. In his 'Behavior-Based Robotics,'
roboticist Ronald Arkin of the Georgia Institute of Technology argues
that 'consciousness may be overrated,' and notes that 'most roboticists
are more than happy to leave these debates on consciousness to those
with more philosophical leanings.' For many applications, it is enough
that the being seems alive or seems human, and irrelevant whether it
feels so. ... And yet ... there is the dream and the breathtaking possibility
that humanity can actually develop the technology to create qualitatively
new kinds of beings. These might take the form of fully artificial,
yet fully living, intelligent, and conscious creatures -- perhaps humanlike,
perhaps not. Or they might take the form of a race of 'new humans';
that is, bionic or cyborgian people who have been enormously augmented
and extended physically, mentally, and emotionally." June 14, 2004: Computing needs a Grand Challenge. By Lucy Sherriff. The Register. "Sir Tony Hoare - British computing pioneer and senior scientist at Microsoft Research - believes the computer industry needs a "grand challenge" to inspire it. In the same way that the lunar challenge in the 1960s sparked a decade of collaborative innovation and development in engineering and space technology, or the human genome project united biologists around the globe, so too must computer scientists pull together on such a scale to take their industry to its next major milestone. ... One of the grand challenges, then, is to re-write the basic foundations of the science, to find a theory of computation that is 'more realistic than the Turing model, and can take into account the discoveries of biology, and the promise of the quantum computer'.... 'An ultimate joint challenge for the biological and the computational sciences is the understanding of the mechanisms of the human brain, and its relationship with the human mind,' he says. '... This challenge is one that has inspired Computer Science since its very origins, when Alan Turing himself first proposed the Turing Test as a still unmet challenge for artificial intelligence.'"
>>> AI
Overview, Systems, Cognitive
Science, Artificial Life, Turing
Test, Alan Turing (@ Namesakes)
June 8, 2004: Man
who cracked computer engima. Opinion by Andrew Hodges. Edinburg Evening
News / available from Scotsman.com News. "[Alan] Turing was fascinated
by the concept of creating a mathematical machine to represent thought
processes, and it was the 'Turing Machine' which became the foundation
of the modern theories of computer science. He also envisaged a 'Universal
Turing Machine' - one machine for all possible tasks - which embodied
the essential principle of the computer. Turing's originality lay in seeing
the relevance of mathematical logic to a problem originally seen as one
of physics. He made a bridge between thought and action, which crossed
conventional boundaries. All this was when he was just 24. Then he left
Cambridge for a spell at Princeton and right away saw a link from 'useless'
logic to practical purposes. ... In 1944, following the invasion of Normandy
that Allied control of the Atlantic allowed, Alan Turing was almost uniquely
in possession of three key ideas - his own 1936 concept of the universal
machine, the potential speed and reliability of electronic technology
and the inefficiency in designing different machines for different logical
processes. Combined, these ideas provided the principle, the practical
means and the motivation for the modern computer. ... From October 1947,
the National Physical Laboratory allowed, or perhaps preferred, that he
should spend the academic year at Cambridge. Out of this came a pioneering
paper on what would now be called neural nets. ... Though marginalised
in practice, he published his theoretical ideas on artificial intelligence
in 1950 in a paper which is now one of the most quoted in science. His
'Turing Test' for intelligent machinery now has a long and entertaining
history." May 10, 2004: Alan
Turing - Thinking Up Computers. The Cambridge University mathematician
laid the foundation for the invention of software. By Andy Reinhardt.
BusinessWeek Online. ["As part of its anniversary celebration, BusinessWeek
is presenting a series of weekly profiles for the greatest innovators
of the past 75 years."] "The rarefied world of early 20th-century
mathematics seems light years away from today's PCs and virtual-reality
video games. Yet it was a 1936 paper by Cambridge University mathematician
Alan M. Turing that laid the foundation for the electronic wonders now
crowding into every corner of modern life. In a short and eventful life,
Turing also played a vital role in World War II by helping crack Germany's
secret codes -- only to be persecuted later for his homosexuality. ...
Turing invoked the notion of a 'universal machine' that could be given
instructions to perform a variety of tasks. Turing spoke of a "machine"
only abstractly, as a sequence of steps to be executed. But his realization
that the data fed into a system also could function as its directions
opened the door to the invention of software. ... Turing didn't live to
see the revolution he unleashed. But he left an enormous legacy. In 1950
he proposed a bold measure for machine intelligence: If a person could
hold a typed conversation with 'somebody' else, not realizing that a computer
was on the other end of the wire, then the machine could be deemed intelligent.
Since 1990 an annual contest has sought a computer that can pass this
'Turing Test.'" March 23, 2004: FIT
speaker to discuss computers' intelligence. By Alex McPeak. Daily
Helmsman. "One of the major challengers of artificial intelligence
will speak in The Zone at the FedEx Institute of Technology at 1:30 p.m.
Wednesday. John Searle, Mills Professor of the Philosophy of Mind and
Language at the University of California at Berkeley, will discuss consciousness,
causation, reduction and the symbol grounding problem -- tongue-twister
concepts that confront whether a computer can ever understand what it
is doing. ... The author of 13 books related to cognitive science, Searle
is best known for his Chinese Room thought experiment, which challenged
the idea of a computer ever achieving true intelligence and understanding.
The Chinese Room proposed that if a person were given Chinese characters
with which to interpret Chinese writings in a room, that person could
match characters to understand what was written on the walls. ... Searle
was the top pick for the cognitive science seminar this semester, [Lee]
McCauley said. The seminar will look at responses to Searle's intellectual
challenge and the systems that claim to answer it. ... The culmination
of the cognitive science seminar this semester, he said, was to set up
criteria to prove if artificial intelligence can really answer the Chinese
Room challenge." March 18, 2004: Dial
'em for Mumbai. By Garry Barker. LiveWire / The Sydney Morning Herald.
"Increasingly, companies in Australia, the US, Europe and Britain
are cutting costs by moving customer contact to countries where English
is good and wages low. It is called outsourcing and, because it is costing
jobs in Western countries, it is now a political football, here and overseas.
... But the outsourcers now face a challenge from fast-developing artificial
intelligence and speech-synthesis technologies. Mobile phones, which now
outnumber fixed-lines in Australia, do not suit call centres that ask
customers to push keypad buttons. If you call ScanSoft, a speech-synthesis
company in Sydney, you will be greeted by an Australian voice that is
rich, tutored and welcoming. ... Few callers realise they have been holding
a conversation with a computer. ... That, some say, is the future for
call centres - perhaps the ultimate future of human jobs of many kinds." March 17, 2004: Software
agent targets chatroom paedophiles. By Duncan Graham-Rowe. New Scientist
Magazine (p. 23). "Paedophiles attempting to 'groom' children in
internet chatrooms can now be detected by a computer program. The program
works by putting on a convincing impression of a young person taking part
in a chatroom conversation. At the same time it analyses the behaviour
of the person it is chatting with, looking for classic signs of grooming:
paedophiles pose as children as they attempt to arrange meetings with
the children they befriend. Called ChatNannies, the software was developed
in the UK by Jim Wightman, an IT consultant from Wolverhampton in the
West Midlands. It creates thousands of sub-programs, called nanniebots,
which log on to different chatrooms and strike up conversations with users
and groups of users. ... Chatbots scarcely distinguishable from people
were predicted by computer pioneer Alan Turing as long ago as 1950, says
Aaron Sloman, an artificial intelligence expert at the University of Birmingham
in the UK. So he is not surprised the bots are so convincing, especially
as their conversation is restricted to a limited topic - like youth culture,
say - and is kept relatively short. ... ChatNannies includes a neural
network program that continually builds up knowledge about how people
use language, and employs this information to generate more realistic
and plausible patterns of responses. ... Can you tell the difference?
In this chatroom dialogue, which is the bot and which is the human? ..." February 21, 2004: Web
Wise - The Internet is brimming with weird and wonderful websites.
Today Dan Sharp looks at Bot Or Not. Lincolnshire Echo / available from
this is lincolnshire. "Artificial intelligence has come a long way
since its invention as a concept in the 1980s. This website [http://www.markconnell.com/mark/]
invites you to interact with a 'bot' ...." February 20, 2004: Has
Text-porn finally made computers 'human'? By Mark Ward. BBC News.
"At first glance spam, pornographic text messages and video games
are not contributing much to human development. But a good case can be
made for regarding all three as some of the smartest artificial intelligences
around. Some may even have beaten the legendary 'Turing Test' by convincing
thousands of people that they are human. The test was dreamed up pioneering
mathematician Alan Turing as a way to judge machine intelligence. It revolves
around people and machines communicating via typed messages. ... Today
we communicate with lots of machines via typed messages and lots of us
have been fooled. ... But the best candidate for passing the Turing test
is the Natachata program that conducts smutty conversations via text messages.
... Some users work out it is a machine, [Simon Luttrell] said, and never
come back. But, worryingly, some like the fact that it is a machine." January 11, 2004: Face
of a new generation. The Age. "Stelarc's experiments with the
human body and artificial intelligence have culminated in possibly his
weirdest project yet, writes Ashley Crawford. ... Prosthetic Head,
Stelarc's first serious excursion into the realm of artificial intelligence
(AI), which is appearing at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image,
at Federation Square, may well be his weirdest foray yet. In 1936, a young
logician, Alan Turing, created an imaginary automaton, the Turing Test.
The theoretical mechanism could recognise human speech patterns and over
the years it became a standard way of arguing as to whether a machine
could acquire intelligence. The proof would be in the machine's recognition
of abstract thought and its ability to respond intelligibly and even,
in theory, emotively, to a given set of questions. Well, we're not there
yet, but Stelarc's Prosthetic Head does give pause for thought.
AI has been fodder for science fiction for decades, but for the layman
this encounter with a conversational system is unnerving indeed." January 7, 2004: Grad
student wins $10,000 game theory competition. By Helen Cheng. The
Stanford Daily. "Computer science graduate student Luke Biewald has
snapped up the top $10,000 prize in the California Institute of Technology
Turing Tournament, a contest based on mathematician Alan Turing's original
theories on artificial intelligence and held by a group of Caltech economists.
Biewald won by writing a program that detects the difference between human
and non-human responses in game theory type games." December 5, 2003: Turing
test. By Quah Seng Sun. The Star Online. "There November 23, 2003: I,
Robot - British mathematician Alan Turing predicted
that one day machines would think, and devised the Turing Test of artificial
intelligence. Fifty years on, are computers any smarter -- or just more
talkative? By Andrew Hodges. The Japan Times. "The man who devised
the Loebner Prize's scenario of a human conversing with a machine, back
in 1950 when computers barely existed, was also the man who first clearly
defined the roles of computer hardware and software. That man was Alan
Turing, who invented the computer in 1936. In that year he described the
idea of a universal machine, running any program placed on its input tape.
This became the principle of the stored-program digital computer, when
it was embodied in electronics after 1945. In 1950, Turing wrote a paper
on the idea of software simulating the mental operations of the brain
-- a paper that is now one of the most famous in scientific literature.
In it, Turing emphasized that to evince human intelligence, a program
must be capable of witty repartee. He also devised the game-show format
of competition with a human, with communication only through computer
terminals. What he called the 'Imitation Game' is now usually called the
'Turing Test.' ... More important than the exact form of the Turing Test
is the mathematician's assertion that intelligence could eventually be
passed by a computer program -- that Artificial Intelligence (or 'intelligent
machinery,' in his words) would be created." November 23, 2003: Talk
to her - Artificial intelligence vs. human stupidity. By Victoria
James. The Japan Times. "The earliest chatterbot programs ever written
say more about the human condition than they do about the nature of computer
intelligence. The first, ELIZA -- or Dr. Eliza, as 'she' was known --
had the persona of a Rogerian psychotherapist. Her successor, perhaps
the inspiration for Marvin, the 'paranoid android' of Douglas Adams' anarchic
'The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy' novels, was named PARRY and was
programmed to display the behavioral hallmarks of a paranoid schizophrenic.
... [Joseph] Weizenbaum recognized that Alan Turing's 'Imitation Game'
test of computer intelligence required merely that the computer simulate
intelligence, so he used some simple semantic tricks to create the desired
effect. (It's no coincidence that his program shares the name of Eliza
Doolittle, the erstwhile heroine of George Bernard Shaw's 'Pygmalion,'
a flower girl trained up to act like a lady in a perfect example of an
'imitation game.') ... In 1994, the term 'chatterbot' was established
in the AI lexicon by Michael Mauldin of Carnegie Mellon University, in
his account of entering the Loebner contest." November 2003: Baffling
the Bots - Anti-spammers take on automatons posing as humans. By Lee
Bruno. Scientific American. "Bots are well known for helping to generate
millions of spam messages advertising printer cartridges, septic systems,
Viagra and Nigerian money scams. ... During the fall of 2000 [Henry] Baird
conducted a trial at the University of California at Berkeley. The resulting
paper dealt with a new image-degradation model named Pessimal Print. Concurrently,
Yahoo and [Manuel] Blum and his team at Carnegie Mellon were working on
a similar model, one version of which is called EZ-Gimpy. It is a kind
of reverse Turing test, which has come to be known as a CAPTCHA, or 'completely
automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart.' These
Turing tests for Internet bots are a cognitive puzzle that can be solved
by humans but not by computers. ... EZ-Gimpy has worked well, but next-generation
bots are getting wise to it. They are getting better at recognizing the
distorted words contained in the dictionary. But Baird, along with Monica
Chew of Berkeley, co-developed BaffleText, a new CAPTCHA scheme that goes
beyond the 850-word dictionary of EZ-Gimpy. ... BaffleText incorporates
nonsense words to overcome the problem of a small dictionary. Also, it
leverages Gestalt psychology, or a human's innate ability to infer the
whole picture of an image from only partial information (something machines
can't do)." October 23, 2003: Human
possibilities. By Jim McClellan. The Guardian. "'Tell me a joke.'
A small audience sits in front of a big screen waiting for a response
to pop up. A short pause - then some type flickers up onscreen. 'Why did
the chicken cross the road?' A slight groan from the audience. A reply
is dutifully typed up. 'I don't know - why did the chicken cross the road?'
Another pause. Up on screen, more type appears. 'Because it was stapled
to the elephant.' Welcome to the Loebner prize contest, an annual attempt
to find the world's most 'human-seeming' chatbot. A chatbot is a program
designed imitate human conversation in text form. This year's event took
place at the University of Surrey. ... At the end of the afternoon, as
expected, the two humans came out top, though rather perplexingly, one
judge decided that both only rated one on a scale of five when it came
to seeming human. (The same judge gave all the bots one, as well.) The
chatbot that came next (and hence won) was Jabberwock, created by Juergen
Pirner, a German publisher of fantasy and science fiction. ... Organiser
Lynn Hamill, of Surrey University's Digital World Research Centre, says
she saw the contest as an amusing way of advancing the interests of the
Centre, which was set up to look at the way people and technologies interact.
'The Loebner prize is a useful way of getting people to think about these
things,' she says, adding that it may help AI research in general." October 20, 2003: German
chatty bot is 'most human'. By Jo Twist. BBC. "A German computer
program has chatted its way to first place in the Loebner Prize for human-like
communication. ... The event is based on the Turing Test, which suggests
computers could be seen as intelligent if their chat was indistinguishable
from those of humans. ... Jabberwock - not to be confused with Britain's
Jabberwacky - was named the 'most human' program, winning its German creator
Juergen Pirner the bronze medal." September 22, 2003: Chatbot
bids to fool humans - A computer program designed to talk like a human
is preparing for its biggest test in its bid to be truly "intelligent".
By Jo Twist. BBC. "Jabberwacky lives on a computer hard drive, tells
jokes, uses slang, sometimes swears and can be quite a confrontational
conversationalist. What sets this chatty AI (artificial intelligence)
chatbot apart from others is the more it natters, the more it learns.
The bot is the only UK finalist in this year's Loebner Prize and is hoping
to chat its way to a gold medal for its creator, Rollo Carpenter. The
Loebner Prize is the annual competition to find the computer with the
most convincing conversational skills and started in 1990. Jabberwacky
will join eight other international finalists in October, when they pit
their wits against flesh and blood judges to see if they can pass as one
of them. It is the ultimate Turing Test, which was designed by mathematician
Alan Turing to see whether computers 'think' and have 'intelligence'."
August 30, 2003: Mind-Expanding
Machines - Artificial intelligence meets good old-fashioned human
thought. By Bruce Bower. Science News Online ( Vol. 164, No. 9). "When
Kenneth M. Ford considers the future of artificial intelligence, he doesn't
envision legions of cunning robots running the world. Nor does he have
high hopes for other much-touted AI prospects -- among them, machines
with the mental moxie to ponder their own existence and tiny computer-linked
devices implanted in people's bodies. When Ford thinks of the future of
artificial intelligence, two words come to his mind: cognitive prostheses.
... In short, a cognitive prosthesis is a computational tool that amplifies
or extends a person's thought and perception, much as eyeglasses are prostheses
that improve vision. ... Current IHMC projects include an airplane-cockpit
display that shows critical information in a visually intuitive format
rather than on standard gauges; software that enables people to construct
maps of what's known about various topics, for use in teaching, business,
and Web site design; and a computer system that identifies people's daily
behavior patterns as they go about their jobs and simulates ways to organize
those practices more effectively. Such efforts, part of a wider discipline
called human-centered computing, attempt to mold computer systems to accommodate
how humans behave rather than build computers to which people have to
adapt. ... Just as it proved too difficult for early flight enthusiasts
to discover the principles of aerodynamics by trying to build aircraft
modeled on bird wings, Ford argues, it may be too hard to unravel the
computational principles of intelligence by trying to build computers
modeled on the processes of human thought. That's a controversial stand
in the artificial intelligence community." July 2, 2003: Spam-bot
tests flunk the blind. By Paul Festa. CNET News. "An increasingly
popular technique for preventing e-mail abuse is frustrating some visually
impaired Net users, setting the stage for a conflict between spam busters
and advocates for the disabled. Many companies have recently begun requiring
users to pass a verification test in order to access their services--typically
by typing into a Web form a few characters that appear on the form in
a guise that prevents a computer or software robot from recognizing and
copying them. ... Efforts to create tests aimed at distinguishing humans
from machines go back decades, with the most famous formulation of the
problem posed in 1950 by the English mathematician and World War II 'Enigma'
code breaker Alan Turing. Turing's controversial hypothesis was that a
machine could be defined as 'intelligent' if a questioner could be fooled
into believing it was a person. Visual tests in a sense turn that theory
on its head, assuming that a machine is defined by its inability to perform
a task that is easy for most humans to accomplish. ... Some Web sites
using visual tests provide work-arounds for the visually impaired; some
don't." June 16, 2003: Captchas
- Computer Tests Can Defeat Spam. Ingenious computer tests may also
advance machine vision and AI. By Jaikumar Vijayan. Computerworld. " May/June 2003: Creating
a Robot Culture - An Interview with Luc Steels. The well-known researcher
shares his views on the Turing test, robot evolution, and the quest to
understand intelligence. By Tyrus L. Manuel. IEEE Intelligent Systems.
"The Turing test is not the challenge that AI as a field is trying
to solve. It would be like requiring aircraft designers to try and build
replicas of birds that cannot be distinguished from real birds, instead
of seriously studying aerodynamics or building airplanes that can carry
cargo (and do not flap their wings nor have feathers). ... Computers and
robots are used as experimental platforms for investigating issues about
intelligence. Researchers who are motivated in this way, and I am one
of them, try to make contributions to biology or the cognitive sciences.
... AI has had an enormous impact on how we think today about the brain
and the mechanisms underlying cognitive behavior." May 22, 2003: Code
Breakers Remembered. By Mike Green. Electronic Business. "Earlier
this month the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
presented a milestone award commemorating the technological advances performed
at Bletchley Park, England, to aid the allied forces during World War
II. Led by Alan Turing, the team successfully cracked the codes of the
Japanese, Italian, and German military, including the notorious Enigma
code. ... Turing received the OBE for his contribution to the war effort,
and went on to be appointed principal scientific officer at the National
Physical Laboratories (NPL), where he was put in charge of a team to work
on creating an electronic computing device (in direct competition with
work already in progress across the Atlantic on the ENIAC). ... He then
took on the role of Deputy Director of the Computational Laboratories
in Manchester University, and his paper on the philosophy of machine and
mind - 'computing machinery & intelligence' again showed his grasp of
ideas way beyond the capacity of his peers. In this work he predicted
the development of artificial intelligence, decades before it would become
a reality." April 10, 2003: World's
Largest Chatter Bot Competition Underway at ChatterBoxChallenge.com.
PRNewswire / available from Silicon Valley Business Ink. "Eighty-eight
Chatter Bots from around the world were entered in the 2003 Chatter Box
Challenge sponsored by Zabaware Inc. A Chatter Bot, also known simply
as a bot, is software programmed with artificial intelligence that is
able to carry on intelligent conversations with human beings. This is
the third year for the competition. According to Zabaware President Robert
Medeksza, 'Zabaware hopes to promote further research and development
in the area of artificial intelligence by sponsoring this contest.' Since
2001, the number of entries in the competition skyrocketed from 48 to
88 making this year's competition the largest in the world. Award winning
bots are selected through a combination of scores from the general public
and a panel of judges. The general public is encouraged to visit the challenge
website and vote for their favorite bot. Public opinion plays a significant
role in determining the winners. On-line voting is currently underway
and continues until April 30, 2003. Voting instructions, details of the
rules and profiles of all the bots and their inventors are available at
http://www.chatterboxchallenge.com." March 17, 2003: Making
Computers Talk - Say good-bye to stilted electronic chatter: new synthetic-speech
systems sound authentically human, and they can respond in real time.
By Andy Aaron, Ellen Eide and John F. Pitrelli. Scientific American Explore.
"What are the immediate uses of this technology? They include delivery
of up-to-the-minute news, reading machines for the handicapped, automotive
voice controls and retrieving e-mail over the phone--or any system where
the vocabulary is large, the content changes frequently or unpredictably,
and a visual display isn't practical. In the future Supervoices could
enhance video and computer games, handheld devices and even motion-picture
production. ... Scientists have attempted to simulate human speech since
the late 1700s, when Wolfgang von Kempelen built a 'Speaking Machine'
that used an elaborate series of bellows, reeds, whistles and resonant
chambers to produce rudimentary words. ... Software ... converts the written
text from a series of words into one of phonemes. The software notes features
of interest about each phoneme, such as what phonemes preceded and followed
it, or whether it is the first or last one in a sentence. It also identifies
parts of speech such as nouns or verbs in the text. ... We often debate
among ourselves the holy grail of text-to-speech technology. Should it
be indistinguishable from a live human speaker, as in a Turing test?"
February 27, 2003: Artificial
stupidity, Part 2 - Can chatterbots be as dumb as a box of hammers
and still pass the Turing test? Go ask ALICE, she might know. By John
Sundman. Salon. [Part 1 appears below.] "A
vocal camp in the brainy 'philosophy of mind' profession believes that
the Turing test should be relegated to the history books, but I'm going
to assert axiomatically that the test, as it is generally understood by
ordinary humans like you and me, is interesting. The question of whether
computers can successfully pose as human beings has obsessed writers,
filmmakers and computer scientists for decades. Therefore, without getting
sucked into a philosophical vortex about the nature of minds, machines,
intelligence and so forth, all we need to find out -- if we want to know
if the Loebner competition matters -- is whether there exists a more respectable
variant of the Turing test. As far as I can determine, there doesn't.
The Turing test is, as it were, state-of-the-art." February 26, 2003: Artificial
stupidity - The saga of Hugh Loebner and his search for an intelligent
bot has almost everything: Sex, lawsuits and feuding computer scientists.
There's only one thing missing: Smart machines. [Part 1 of 2.]
By John Sundman. Salon. "Since 1989 Loebner has spent, by his account,
more than $200,000 and a thousand hours of unpaid time to hasten the arrival
of intelligent machines. He has set aside a gold medal and $100,000 in
cash for the creator of the first machine that can pass for human. In
the meantime he gives out annual prizes for programs that come closest
to a long-sought holy grail in the artificial intelligence community:
passing the Turing test. ... To win the Loebner competition, software
programs must mimic human conversation. Such programs are known as 'chatting
robots' or, more often, 'chatterbots' or simply 'bots.' But today's academic
A.I. researchers consider the chatterbot approach simpleminded. The Loebner
competition, they argue, isn't a real measure of progress in artificial
intelligence but merely a 'bot beauty contest.' ... Alan Turing was the
British mathematician, cryptographer and prototypical computer scientist
who, some say, did as much as Winston Churchill to save Western civilization
from the Nazis. ... The Turing test is the canonical benchmark by which
we humans will know that computers have caught up with us in the smarts
department. ... Long known to historians of the computer, the Turing test
emerged from obscurity and became part of popular culture in 1966, when
Joseph Weizenbaum's simple 200-line Eliza program, which used a few simple
tricks to generate bland responses to human-posed questions, fooled people
into thinking they were conversing with an intelligent being." February 21, 2003: Intelligent
machine. By Quah Seng Sun. The Star Online. "In the world of
computing, few figures loom as large as Alan Turing, a British mathematician.
He not only cracked the Nazi codes during World War II, but also laid
the groundwork for the creation of the modern computer. Today, he is considered
the father of the computing sciences. One of his most enduring contributions
is a simple test for artificial intelligence that he proposed in 1950.
... The Man versus Machine match in New York between Gary Kasparov and
Deep Junior shows how far the development of the chess computer programs
has progressed. Take, for example, the fifth game in this match, the unexpected
10?Bxh2+ played by Deep Junior. Here was a sacrifice of material with
no apparent decisive advantage other than the gain of the initiative over
its opponent, something that a human would do or consider doing, but something
totally unexpected from a computer program. In a way, I would consider
the 10?Bxh2+ move to be a defining moment when a computer program comes
closest to passing the Turing Test for chess." February 10, 2003: At
one with the universe - Do androids dream of electric sheep? Colin
Tudge in London examines definitions of consciousness and artificial intelligence.
The Age. "Is the brain simply a computer, and is consciousness merely
the feeling we get when we think? Or is consciousness a primary component
of the universe, which the brain can latch on to, like a radio receiver?
... There are three points of view. The first, which can be traced back
to the founder of modern computing, Alan Turing, and is embraced by the
Oxford physiologist Colin Blakemore, is pragmatic. Turing pointed out
that it is impossible to know whether other human beings are conscious.
Because we feel conscious, we assume other people must be like us. But
this can only be an inference. But suppose we made a computer - a robot
- that could make whimsical jokes and pass the sandwiches without being
asked.... [T]he emerging modern view says that matter and consciousness
are not separate entities, as Descartes supposed, but complementary aspects
of the universe. Both exist, but neither is primary. Each is the obverse
of the other, like two sides of a coin." Also raised in the article
is the question: "Is it reasonable to ascribe consciousness to a
droll and well-mannered aunt, yet deny it in a robot that behaves like
one?" February 6, 2003: Machine
visionary - Author and inventor Ray Kurzweil is an authority on artificial
intelligence. Interviewed by Hamish Mackintosh. The Guardian. Here's
a sample of what you'll find: "[Q:] 'Is AI experiencing a renaissance?'
[A:] 'We're in an era of what I'd call 'narrow AI', where systems are
performing intelligent functions that used to require human intelligence.
Intelligent systems can fly and land airplanes or make financial investment
decisions. These were research projects 10 years ago and are now in widespread
practical application and have become integrated into our information
infrastructure. Every time an application works, it's no longer called
AI - it becomes a separate field. It's speech recognition, character recognition,
robotics, machine vision, etc.'" January 8, 2003: Computer
pioneer aids spam fight. BBC. "Many companies that make a living
sending unsolicited commercial e-mail, or spam, use software robots to
scour the web looking for, and signing up to, free e-mail accounts. The
robots use the accounts as a launch pad for millions of spam e-mail messages
and plunder directories to gather lists of people they can bombard with
unwanted mail. Now, some web-based e-mail operators, such as Yahoo and
Hotmail, are using tricks that make it impossible for the robots to sign
up for an account. The technique presents someone signing up with a distorted
image of a sequence of characters, usually a random mix of letters and
numbers. ... These spam-stopping systems are known as 'Captchas' which
stands for Completely Automated Public Turing tests to tell Computers
and Humans Apart. Pioneering development on Captchas has been done by
Luis von Ahn, Manuel Blum, Nick Hopper and John Langford from the School
of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh, US. The robot-spotting
system draws on the work of pioneering scientist Alan Turing. ... Captchas
are starting to cause problems for anyone who is blind or has impaired
vision and cannot see the characters they are being asked to decipher." December 10, 2002: Human
or Computer? Take This Test. By Sara Robinson. The New York Times
(no-fee reg. req'd). "As chief scientist of the Internet portal Yahoo,
Dr. Udi Manber had a profound problem: how to differentiate human intelligence
from that of a machine. His concern was more than academic. Rogue computer
programs masquerading as teenagers were infiltrating Yahoo chat rooms,
collecting personal information or posting links to Web sites promoting
company products. ... The roots of Dr. Manber's philosophical conundrum
lay in a paper written 50 years earlier by the mathematician Dr. Alan
Turing, who imagined a game in which a human interrogator was connected
electronically to a human and a computer in the next room. The interrogator's
task was to pose a series of questions that determined which of the other
participants was the human. ... Dr. Manuel Blum, a professor of computer
science at Carnegie Mellon who took part in the Yahoo conference, realized
that the failures of artificial intelligence might provide exactly the
solution Yahoo needed. Why not devise a new sort of Turing test, he suggested,
that would be simple for humans but would baffle sophisticated computer
programs. Dr. Manber liked the idea, so with his Ph.D. student Luis von
Ahn and others Dr. Blum devised a collection of cognitive puzzles based
on the challenging problems of artificial intelligence. The puzzles have
the property that computers can generate and grade the tests even though
they cannot pass them. The researchers decided to call their puzzles Captchas,
an acronym for Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers
and Humans Apart (on the Web at www.captcha.net)." August 16, 2002: Does
schmoozing make robots clever? By Matthew Broersma. CNET. "A
Belgian professor doing research for Sony wants to teach robots to be
more like people--but he's running into some resistance. ... Steels' work
deals with machine intelligence, but it's a fundamentally different view
from that embodied in the famous 'Turing test.' According to the Turing
theory, a human-like intelligence has successfully been created when a
human can't tell the difference between a conversation with the artificial
intelligence and a real one. 'I think the Turing test is a bad idea because
it's completely fake,' Steels said. 'It's like saying you want to make
a flying machine, so you produce something that is indistinguishable from
a bird. On the other hand, an airplane achieves flight but it doesn't
need to flap its wings.' Similarly Steels believes that machines can evolve
intelligence through interaction with one another and with their ecology
-- but this synthetic intelligence it is unlikely to bear much superficial
resemblance to human intelligence. ... This notion has met with resistance
on both theoretical and practical levels. Some scientists, such as Rodney
Brooks of MIT, have argued that intelligent behavior doesn't need internal
representations." July 7, 2002: Approximating
Life. By Clive Thompson. The New York Times Magazine; pages 30 -33
(no-fee reg. req'd). "Each morning, he wakes before dawn and watches
conversations stream by on his screen. Thousands of people flock to his
Web site every day from all over the world to talk to his creation, a
robot called Alice. It is the best artificial-intelligence program on
the planet, a program so eerily human that some mistake it for a real
person. As [Richard] Wallace listens in, they confess intimate details
about their lives, their dreams; they talk to Wallace's computer about
God, their jobs, Britney Spears. It is a strange kind of success: Wallace
has created an artificial life form that gets along with people better
than he does. ...Is she intelligent? If so, how? In 1950, the pioneering
British mathematician Alan Turing grappled with this question in the journal
Mind, where he first posed the 'Turing Test' -- the gold standard for
artificial thought. 'Can machines think?' he asked -- and immediately
noted that the question hinges, of course, on what 'thinking' is."
May 2002 [issue date]: Wanna Bet? Seventeen of the world's most wired minds stake their names - and their cash - on the future. By Martha Baer, Chris Baker, Alix Berger, Ted Greenwald, and Jenn Kahn. Wired (10.05). "The Long Bets Foundation, a new project masterminded by Well founder Stewart Brand and Wired editor at large Kevin Kelly, hopes to raise the quality of our collective foresight by incorporating money and accountability into the process of debate. ... Bettors designate nonprofits to receive the proceeds." And here's the AI long bet:
>>> Turing Test, History, Overview April 1, 2002: On
a Futurists' Forum, Money Backs Up Predictions. By Andrew Zipern.
The New York Times (no-fee reg. req'd). "The Long Bets Foundation,
a nonprofit group founded by two longtime Silicon Valley gadflies, Stewart
Brand and Kevin Kelly, started an online forum last week for those willing
to put their money, and reputations, behind their speculation. ... Ray
Kurzweil, an artificial intelligence expert, bet Mitchell D. Kapor, the
founder of Lotus Development, that by 2029 'a computer -- or 'machine
intelligence' ' will pass the Turing test, which states that artificial
intelligence will be proved when a machine's conversation can be mistaken
for a person's. Each man wagered $10,000 of his own money." February 24, 2002: Wise
guys and living dolls - The line between machine and man has fascinated
inventors and tricksters down the centuries. By Simon Schaffer. The
Observer. "Very simplified versions of this Turing Test are now held
as annual events.... But Turing's first version of the imitation game
was much more fascinating. He started by imagining a female and a male
player, the judge having to spot the man. Then he would replace the woman
with a computer. So the real task of the putatively intelligent machine,
on Turing's showing, was not to pass as a human, but to replicate a woman
pretending to be a man: a more tantalising task. The odd idea that machine
intelligence successfully replicates deceit has a long history. Gaby Wood's
new and magical tour of that history [Living Dolls: A Magical History
of the Quest for Mechanical Life] offers seductive glimpses of its major
landmarks." October 16, 2001: ALICE
talks her way to victory in AI challenge. By Rupert Goodwins. ZDNet
UK. "ALICE, the Artificial Linguistic Internet Computer Entity, has
won the Loebner prize, but remains decidedly underwhelmed at the dubious
honour. For the second year running, ALICE -- Artificial Linguistic Internet
Computer Entity -- has won the bronze medal and $2,000 at the annual Loebner
Prize for Artificial Intelligence." October 13, 2001: Think
Fast, Clever Robot. By Farhad Manjoo. Wired News. "The Loebner
Prize works very much like that 1950's television game show To Tell the
Truth, in which celebrity panelists attempted to discover which of three
people was the real fellow claiming to have done something extraordinary.
In the Loebner contest, judges are presented with a bevy of chat terminals
to type into. Some of the terminals are manned by robots, some by people.
The judges hold short conversations with the chatter, looking for unmistakable
humanity on the other end." October 6, 2001: It's
the thought that counts. By Dylan Evans. Guardian. "Will machines
ever be able to think for themselves? And will we be able to tell if and
when they do? Pondering these questions in 1950, the British mathematician
Alan Turing came up with a simple way of settling the matter. Put a machine
in one room, he suggested, and a human being in another. ... Every year
since 1990, computer programmers have competed for Loebner's prize of
$100,000 and a gold medal. As yet, nobody has won the gold medal, which
will be awarded when a computer program finally fools the judges into
thinking that it is a human being, but a bronze medal and a cash prize
of $2,000 is awarded annually to the contestant who comes the closest.
... The contest for the 2001 Loebner prize takes place next Saturday,
October 13, at the Science Museum, London."
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