Comment by throwawayaway | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwawayaway | Hacker News Reader

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"Computing machinery and intelligence" wherein the test is outlined, with background. aka "The Imitation Game"

http://cogprints.org/499/1/turing.HTML

> The aim of the Turing Test is to say that judging machines based on...

That wasn't the aim at all, again I think you are reading way too much in to it. The aim was to pose a test that would fool people.

Alan Turing:

"an average interrogator will not have more than 70 per cent chance of making the right identification after five minutes"

"The original question, "Can machines think?" I believe to be too meaningless to deserve discussion. Nevertheless I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted."

The test is a very simple thought exercise where he shows a machine will be able to pass for a human, and a human will fail to identify a machine. That's it. No questions of consciousness, metaphysics! In fact he dismisses such questions in the paper.

His belief was that in 50 years time, the words may have changed, and people's opinions about what constitutes thinking would have changed to the point where: someone could say "a computer thinks" without challenge. That hasn't happened, when somebody says "a computer thinks" they are saying it with tongue firmly in cheek. Maybe in another 65 years time his belief will come true.

You're essentially saying what I was saying. That Turing tried to throw metaphysics out of the window in favor of a practical approach (behavior-based = fooling a human).

As for public perception of consciousness or "thinking", time estimations are usually quite sketchy.

Nope. We disagree fundamentally on the aim of the Turing test. Sure we agree things were thrown out the window, we agree it's a practical test. You think its aim is a fair way for judging machines to be conscious.

I think it's a thought experiment to show that machines are going to be able to fool an average human for some small length of time eventually. That's a lot less grandiose.

A mistaken interaction with an IRC bot or an automated phone service has the same net effect.

Hm? "I think this was a huge step in the right direction." I guess what I am arguing is, that if there's any fair test, it has to be practical and not metaphysical, that's why I think the Turing Test is a step in the right direction. Do I make the claim that the Turing Test as-is is fair when it comes to determining "consciousness" by any reasonable and practical manner? No.

If I am reading what you are saying correctly, I surmise that you're saying that the Turing Test doesn't say anything about consciousness, but rather, is just about the probability of a machine being able to fool a human. I am saying that the reason why Turing even ponders the question is that there's no good way of definitely answering if a machine (or another human for that matter) is conscious or not. So that leaves the ability of being able to fool (or convince) other thinking machines that one is intelligent (or conscious) as the only viable metric.

I feel like most of this is mainly semantics. I too, don't believe that one can actually determine the consciousness of anyone but oneself. However, we do convince ourselves that other humans are in fact conscious, so it's still interesting to try to figure out what it would take for us to do that, and then apply the same standards to machines.

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