A Good Sense of Humour The humour in Turing's
original 1950 paper (see this
Scrapbook page) is alive and well in the various programs
that have been running under Turing Test conditions.
There is serious point to be made about Turing's humour: he
was making it very clear that what he meant by 'intelligence'
was something that could not only play chess but make a joke,
connecting with the real language of real life.
Serious Artificial Intelligence people take a dim view of
these efforts as a distraction from systematic research, but
on the other hand, one virtue of Turing's scenario is that it
obliges us to keep in mind the goal of machines rivalling
human 'intelligence' without ifs or buts. And the public
interest in these efforts has been a large factor in keeping
Alan Turing alive and well in the public mind.
Sex on the brain...Turing suggested that within 50
years a computer would pass a (actually not very stringent)
comparison test, and now 2000 has come and gone. In 1991 the
call went out for entries to a contest under Turing Test
conditions. The Loebner
Prize Contest has continued each year. In November 1991
the winning program was by Joseph Weintraub on the topic
romantic conversation, and he was the winner
again in 1992 and 1993. In 1994 the Loebner
Prize Winner was Thomas Whalen. The topic of this computer
program was Sex.
You can talk to the 1994 winning program by going to this page
and opening the TELNET dialogue box. I asked 'How do men have
sex with each other,' and was impressed that it could
interpret this and give a suitably PC answer about gay sex.
Saying I was a gay teenager, I asked how to find a boyfriend
and got an all-purpose answer including 'Go to church.' I
said, 'But churches are anti-gay,' and it said 'I cannot
answer that.' After that it kept on repeating itself, and I
couldn't see how anyone could possibly take it for a human; it
seemed more like a politician on television. But it was fun.
In the contest on 16 December 1995, Joseph Weintraub
regained supremacy: look at the results
of the contest. For the first time the programs entered were
not limited to a subject. But as you will see from the transcript
sex still dominated the conversation.
The 1996
contest was held on April 16, and was won by Jason Hutchens
(who has a great sense of humour) with a conversation which
set new levels of intelligent
discourse.
Unfortunately HEX is no longer available for on-line chat
but you can download the HEX program in various formats
directly here, and
read his description of how it
works.
There's a lively discussion of these contests and dialogues
by Charles
Platt, one of the people who were claiming to be genuine
humans in the 1994 competition.
The 1997
contest was held on 29 April, and was won by David Levy.
The winning
conversation got off to a hot start:
PROGRAM: Did you see that story on CNN last
night about the lesbian couple who came out at a White House
party on Sunday?
JUDGE05: NO. I just came in yesterday.
I'm still kind of jet-lagged.
PROGRAM: Ellen Degeneres
was one of them - she was kissing her lover...
On 11 January 1998 the competition was held in Sydney,
Australia. The winner was Robby
Garner, who won again in 1999. In this
contest the proceedings were open to the cyberpublic on
Internet Relay Chat (see below.)
The fifty years are upThe competition for 2000,
the fiftieth anniversary of Turing's prediction, was held at
Dartmouth
College, New Hampshire.
The winner was A. L. I. C. E. by Richard
Wallace. Chat to A. L. I. C. E. here or here.
But no program entered for the competition came close to
deceiving the judges. So we can say that Alan Turing was wrong
in his prediction.
The next competition, in October 2001, was held at the Science Museum,
London. Richard Wallace was again the winner. See the page
about the competition.
The 2002
competition was held in Atlanta. It was won by Kevin L.
Copple with EllaZ. The
description boasts that 'The content of the CIA World Factbook
has been added to Ella's resources. Now when you ask where or
about any country or capital, an HTML page with a map and
flag, together with economic, political, and geographic info
is displayed.' Not so much Artificial Intelligence as American
Intelligence. This sort of mindless disgorging of
'information' is the antithesis of what Alan Turing had in
mind when illustrating his ideas with wit and humour.
The contest
for October 2003 is hosted by Surrey University.
See
these BBC features on the winner,
Jabberwock and the British
entrant, Jabberwacky. 'If Jabberwacky did not quite pass
the Turing Test this time round, it certainly made the judges
laugh.' Talk to
Jabberwock here.
Eliza shrinks your computerUntil the Loebner Prize,
the most famous program aimed at Turing Test conditions was
the ELIZA imitation psychiatrist, written by Joe Weizenbaum
who is a notable AI sceptic.
You can talk to Eliza here, and
there is another on-line version with commentary here.
Another sceptic, Mark Humphrys, has a page about his ELIZA-type
program.
His scepticism about Turing Tests is much like the view I
put in my book: that you can't separate words from the rest of
life. Nevertheless, his programme induced a dialogue
more human than any other I've seen, when someone logged in
and chatted away without realising he was talking to a
computer.
WARNING: This gets very rude, leading up to are you
a stupid homosexual and logout. I wonder what Alan
Turing would have throught of THAT...
More on computer conversationChatterbot Central
Cybelle, a further quick-fire conversation program, greets
you on Agentland which
is also a gateway to other 'intelligent agents.' Nothing like
true Artificial Intelligence exists — and the imagination of
Brian Aldiss, Stanley
Kubrick and Steven Spielberg doesn't have much to do with
the real content of Turing's ideas — but the more modest
ambitions of limited 'agents' can be tested on-line.
A page on good
questions to put.
Another on-line
conversation program. | 
