Turing musings, one year on...
A few interesting developments bearing some relation to my Turing stories:
1. Listening to the radio yesterday, I heard an amusing interview with the author of the blog, Collision Detection, in which he describes his chat with a chatbot and discusses that in relation to thoughts about the Turing test. I was able to find his blogpost on the subject, but I am unfortunately completely defeated by NPR's search, so I cannot share the radio segment with you even if it is still available. Apologies.
2. While searching for the above post, I happened on an earlier and even more fascinating article of his, which describes the first actual running of a Turing test in September 2004! It also describes the two tests that Turing devised. Interestingly, the test that he writes about at length in his original paper set the 'interrogator' to tell the difference between a man and a woman, with a computer substituting as the man part of the time. It was not a direct judgment between human and machine, though that was the ultimate purpose.
3. I am embarrassed to admit that I had not read Turing's original paper before now. I have since corrected that ommission, and I encourage you to give it a try yourself. I think is not as difficult to understand as you might fear. Some passages I found poignant:
"No engineer or chemist claims to be able to produce a material which is indistinguishable from the human skin. It is possible that at some time this might be done, but even supposing this invention available we should feel there was little point in trying to make a 'thinking machine' more human by dressing it up in such artificial flesh."
"... it is probably possible to rear a complete individual from a single cell of the skin (say) of a man. To do so would be a feat of biological technique deserving of the very highest praise, but we would not be inclined to regard it as a case of 'constructing a thinking machine'."
"I believe that in about fifty years time [the year 2000] it will be possible to programme computers with a storage capacity of about 10^9 [note: 10^9 bytes is one gigabyte] to make them play the imitation game so well that an average interrogator will not have more than 70 per cent chance of making the right identification after five minutes of questioning. 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."
"It is admitted that there are certain things that He cannot do such as making one equal to two, but should we not believe that He has freedom to confer a soul on an elephant if He sees fit? We might expect that He would only exercise this power in conjunction with a mutation which provided the elephant with an appropriately improved brain to minister to the needs of this soul. An argument of exactly similar form may be made for the case of machines. ... In attempting to construct such machines we should not be irreverently usurping His power of creating souls, any more than we are in the procreation of children: rather we are, in either case, instruments of His will providing mansions for the souls that He creates."
"Whenever one of these machines is asked the appropriate critical question, and gives a definite answer, we know that this answer must be wrong, and this gives us a certain feeling of superiority. Is this feeling illusory? ... We too often give wrong answers to questions ourselves to be justified in being very pleased at such evidence of fallibility on the part of the machines."
"The inability to enjoy strawberries and cream may have struck the reader as frivolous. Possibly a machine might be made to enjoy this delicious dish, but any attempt to make one do so would be idiotic. What is important about this disability is that it contributes to some of the other disabilities, e.g. to the difficulty of the same kind of friendliness occurring between man and machine as between white man and white man, or between black man and black man."
"Instead of trying to produce a programme to simulate the adult mind, why not rather try to produce one which simulates the child's? If this were then subjected to an appropriate course of education one would obtain the adult brain. ... It will not be possible to apply exactly the same teaching process to the machine as to a normal child. It will not, for instance, be provided with legs, so that it could not be asked to go out and fill the coal scuttle. Possibly it might not have eyes. But however well these deficiencies might be overcome by clever engineering, one could not send the creature to school with out the other children making excessive fun of it. It must be given some tuition. We need not be too concerned about the legs, eyes, etc. The example of Miss Helen Keller shows that education can take place provided that communication in both directions between teacher and pupil can take place by some means or other."
"We may hope that machines will eventually compete with men in all purely intellectual fields. But which are the best ones to start with? Even this is a difficult decision. Many people think that a very abstract activity, like the playing of chess would be best. It can also be maintained that it is best to provide the machine with the best sense organs that money can buy, and then teach it to understand and speak English. This process could follow the normal teaching of a child. Things would be pointed out and named, etc. Again I do not know what the right answer is, but I think both approaches should be tried. We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done."
4. And finally, one of my friends, who is at the time I write this, an undergraduate engineering student, recently told me that his dream is to be able to produce real human organic materials to replace diseased/wounded body parts. These parts would grow and conform to changes in the body just as naturally-created tissue would. Are the Turings that I imagined for medical testing not too far in the future after all?