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Intelligence, Artificial and that Other Kind
by Roy Youngman on Oct 19, 2008 - 07:36 PM read 135 times Source: http://www.ryoungman.net/?p=44 |
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Nicolas Carr had an interesting post the other day about this year’s Loebner Prize in artificial intelligence. All the excitement this year seems to be over two entries “getting very close to passing the Turing Test for the first time”. Another way of putting it is robots are fooling a greater percentage of people that they are real human beings. This year’s winner, Elbot, fooled 25%.
Nicolas added an update to a site where you can have a conversation with Elbot. That sounded cool so I tried it twice and asked my wife to also give it a try. We both found a conversation with Elbot to be mildly amusing, along the same lines of playing the 20 Questions game if you’ve ever tried that. But it seemed like a cross between trying to talk to a smart-alecky five year old with a touch of ADD and a politician at a press conference. In other words, it was an interesting performance with little substance.
That got me thinking: Is the artificial intelligence of robots getting better or is the general intelligence of human beings declining? Either way would result in a perception that AI was advancing. Elbot is interesting, but the thought that 25% of people couldn’t tell the difference could be as much of a knock on people as it is a testament for AI.
Uh oh…
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