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No THE TURING TEST 60

Am I talking to a robot?

these days are becoming ever more sophisticated – and ‘human’ – (for example to outwit people, soft-ware has been devised that makes spelling mistakes, tries to impress with cool one-liners, or is gener-ally sceptical or grumpy), only one chatbot in history has succeeded in hoodwinking people. The Eugene Goostman computer, programmed by Russian developers, was thought to be a 13-year-old Ukrainian boy by 33 per cent of the judges at a Turing event in London.

HOW IT’S EVALUATEDAlan Turing predicted that by the year 2000, computers would exist that would only be identified as machines after a five-minute conversation with a human interro-gator 70 per cent of the time. That his prophecy has only been fulfilled once since then is considered by some as proof of the complexity of human intelligence. Others regard it as proof that the Turing Test has become outdated.

Whether the test is nonsense or not, the more interesting ques-tion is: What question would you

WHAT IT’S ABOUTIn the film Blade Runner, robots don’t just look like people; they behave like them too. Only a highly complex psychometric procedure, the Voigt-Kampff Test, can distin-guish between man and machine. The dividing line, as we’ll see, is drawn along empathy: people are capable of showing empathy whereas machines are not.

This ‘replicant’ test features in the book by Philip K. Dick on which the film was based, and is inspired by the work of British logician Alan Turing. As early as 1950, he had asked the simple yet far-sighted question: ‘Can machines think?’

THE TESTTuring’s experimental set-up – the Turing Test – works like this: you interrogate two partners that you can neither see nor hear. One partner is a person; the other is a computer. Both try to convince you that they are human. Your task is to find out which one is which. If you are still unable to establish this after a long exchange, the machine has won. And although computers

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a child knows that they can’t. But if you Google the question, you will find an astonishing number of hits for giraffes spotted on motorways, or EU regulations for animal trans-port. A computer will answer the question incorrectly because no one will ever have bothered to enter the correct answer in a database. So we come to the paradoxical conclusion that, when it comes to machines: the easier it is, the trickier.

The most secure methods of exposing machines are so-called Winograd Schemata. These are banal questions that become unin-telligible for computers through grammatical tricks. An example is ‘Question: The large ball crashed right through the table because it was made of Styrofoam. What was made of Styrofoam? The ball or the table?’ This kind of question requires common sense (which computers don’t have) and the capacity to interpret the grammatical reference (which computers cannot do).

ask a computer in order to find out whether it’s a machine? Because that says a lot about how we regard machines. Those who ask general knowledge questions as though they are playing Trivial Pursuit, (e.g. ‘What’s the capital city of Angola?’ In which year was the UN founded?) do not stand a chance, of course. Any common-or-garden search engine can answer these kinds of questions. In times of Wikipedia and Google, this kind of knowledge actually points more to a machine – no human learns these kinds of answers off by heart any more.

One clever way in which machines can be found out is by asking them personal questions. A few years ago, in answer to the question ‘Who created you?’, a test robot answered: ‘The programming language AIML’. But the most tricky area for machines is common sense – the fundamental human capacity to see through banalities and nonsense in a flash. ‘Can giraffes drive cars?’ Even

GOOD TO KNOW

If you surf the Internet, you continually come across little Turing tests: commands to type blurred and distorted rows of letters. These CAPTCHA tests, whose name derives from the Turing Test (Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and

Humans Apart), are puzzles that only a human can solve.

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