HDTenEightyP/NetNews huggingface dataset:
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Turing Test Myths
From: markrose@spss.com (Mark Rosenfelder)
Date: Mon, 17 Aug 1992 19:14:57 GMT
Organization: SPSS Inc.

In article <BILL.92Aug17114642@ca3.nsma.arizona.edu> bill@nsma.arizona.edu 
(Bill Skaggs) writes:
>   > > I believe that, given an hour of interrogation, I would have a
>   > > better than 90% probability of distinguishing between a man and
>   > > a woman.  [ . . . ]
>
>For a male imitating a female, I would begin by asking for an
>explanation of the system of women's clothing sizes.  (Junior, Misses,
>etc.)  Then I would ask for an explanation of "her" philosophy for
>using makeup.  And so on.

Would *you* be able to detect "wrong" answers to these questions?  
If so, then you know enough about women to pass your own test.
If not, then males could certainly imitate women well enough to
pass the test with you.

Or perhaps you're thinking that a woman will administer this particular
test?  Then my wife would probably fail.  She doesn't use much makeup,
so she probably doesn't know enough about it to satisfy a female
inquisitor.

>For a female imitating a male, I would begin by asking "him" to
>describe how "he" shaves his face.  Then I would ask "him" to describe
>the sensations he experiences during orgasm.  And so on.

These strike me as tests of writing ability rather than of gender.
I wonder how many males would fail this test.

>I sincerely doubt that many people could plausibly fake answers to
>these kinds of questions for an hour.
>
>I've seriously thought about setting up a real Male/Female imitation
>game -- for its relevance to the psychology of gender, not for its
>relevance to AI.  

Sounds fun.  Go for it.

Actually, in a sense, this test is tried every day: novelists write 
dialogue and even narration from both sexes' point of view.  How successful
do you think are the male characters of Jane Austen, Emily Bronte, 
Dorothy L. Sayers, or Ursula LeGuin?  How successful are the female
characters of Dickens, Dostoevsky, Poul Anderson, or Raymond Chandler?

But on relevance to AI I agree with you (that was you, wasn't it?)--
success in distinguishing the sexes is a very different thing from
success in detecting intelligence.
From: moravec@Think.COM (Hans Moravec)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Turing Test Myths
Date: 12 Aug 1992 20:23:41 GMT
Organization: Thinking Machines Corporation, Cambridge MA, USA
Distribution: world
NNTP-Posting-Host: turing.think.com

In article <2838@ucl-cs.uucp>, G.Joly@cs.ucl.ac.uk (Gordon Joly) writes:
|> > Eliza never passed the Turing Test.  Never, never, never, never, never.

|> It did, with Feigenbaum's secreatry. She ask Feigenbaum to leave the room.

One might imagine a test to distinguish stories about conversations with 
Weizenbaum's secretary, and conversations with Feigenbaum's secretary.

Maybe something keyed on Bostonisms vs. Californiaspeak.


Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
From: plummer@cs.swarthmore.edu (David Barker-Plummer)
Subject: Re: Turing Test Myths
Organization: Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, PA
	<BILL.92Aug17114642@ca3.nsma.arizona.edu>
	<1992Aug17.191457.8645@spss.com>
	<BILL.92Aug18001050@ca3.nsma.arizona.edu>
Date: Tue, 18 Aug 1992 14:26:41 GMT

In article <BILL.92Aug18001050@ca3.nsma.arizona.edu> bill@nsma.arizona.edu (Bill Skaggs) writes:

BS> markrose@spss.com (Mark Rosenfelder) writes:

BS> > > For a male imitating a female, I would begin by asking for an
BS> > > explanation of the system of women's clothing sizes.  (Junior, Misses,
BS> > > etc.)  Then I would ask for an explanation of "her" philosophy for
BS> > > using makeup.  And so on.
BS> >
BS> > Would *you* be able to detect "wrong" answers to these questions?  
BS> > If so, then you know enough about women to pass your own test.
BS> > If not, then males could certainly imitate women well enough to
BS> > pass the test with you.

BS> Not so.  It is often possible to detect a lie (because of internal
BS> inconsistency) without knowing the truth.

BS> Anyway, try to imagine how *you* (a man) would respond if asked
BS> questions like these.  I know that *I* would be completely befuddled,
BS> and anybody with any sense would quickly realize that I didn't know
BS> what I was talking about.

But, with respect, you are missing an important point.  Turing
explicitly allows that the questions need not be answered.  In the
paper (which I don't have to hand right now, so this is from memory)
an example dialogue fragment has 
Questioner: "Please write me a sonnet on the subject of...", 
Respondent: "Count me out on this one, I never was much good at poetry"

In answer to your proposed questions, I suggest:

"I don't know, I can never find clothes to fit." and "I don't have a
philosophy, I never have time in the morning.  It just goes where it
goes."

-- Dave
From: forbis@carson.u.washington.edu (Gary Forbis)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Development of Complex Structures
Date: 20 Aug 92 15:34:36 GMT
Article-I.D.: u.1992Aug20.153436.4779
Organization: University of Washington, Seattle

In article <915@tdat.teradata.COM> swf@tdat.teradata.com (Stanley Friesen) writes:
>In article <1992Aug18.181021.14352@sequent.com> bfish@sequent.com (Brett Fishburne) writes:
>|A side issue on the evolution argument.  Isn't it reasonable to believe that
>|some things which are considered essential for modern intellectual development
>|could have "evolved" at a time when they were not actually useful, been
>|discarded, and the "re-evolved" in a time when they were an advantage.
>
>I am not entirely sure just what you mean here.  No complex system or structure
>can possibly evolve without *some* use.  But individual, *simple* features
>may well occur more or less at random (*maybe*).  Culture is a very complex
>phenomenon, and could not exist without some use.

Would you support this claim?

It seems to me one structure can build upon another.  Unless there is some
negative to having a structure it can establish itself.  I feel that many 
mating rituals fit this category.  While one may say they serve a use that
use is not defined by the rituals themselves.  Likewise, much of physical
aspects of secondary sexual traits serve no other use than they are selected
by a mutually evolved behavior selecting that trait.

--gary forbis@u.washington.edu
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
From: stgprao@st.unocal.COM (Richard Ottolini)
Subject: Re: Freewill, chaos and digital systems
Organization: Unocal Corporation
Date: Thu, 20 Aug 1992 15:35:39 GMT

Quasi-deterministic systems are possible based on underlying random phenomena.
Two examples:

There is a branch of mathematics called "cellular automata" where there is
an interesting mix of random and determinism.  One type of CA simulation
divides events into microscopic (cell-to-cell interactions) and macroscopic
(averages over large numbers of cells).  The microscopic is give random
initial conditions and random outcome of actions, but objects obey various
convervation laws, e.g. conservation of number, momentum, etc. Amazingly,
on the macroscopic scale, this can be shown to model deterministic physics
such as acoustic wave propagation and fluid flow.

Another mixed random-deterministic system is Kaneva's Sparse Distributed
Memory (Stanford PhD thesis @1984).  It successfully claims one can store and
retrieve items from a memory of which only infinitesmal fraction of the
addresses actually exist, given the addresses are very large (10,000+ bits)
and one guesses at addresses.  At some point the law of large numbers and
the central limit theorem takes effect with interesting consequences.

The physical brain is a larger system than these two examples.
I see no problem with semi-randomness at the neuron and sub-neuron level
leading to non-random behavior in the large.
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
From: bfish@sequent.com (Brett Fishburne)
Subject: Re: what is consciousness for?
Followup-To: comp.ai.philosophy
Organization: Sequent Computer Systems Inc.
Date: Tue, 18 Aug 92 18:10:21 GMT

In article <1992Aug18.161151.12316@mp.cs.niu.edu> rickert@mp.cs.niu.edu (Neil Rickert) writes:
>In article <Bt6K1u.Iyr@watdragon.uwaterloo.ca> cpshelle@logos.uwaterloo.ca (cameron shelley) writes:
>>
>>This reminds me of a theory of culture I learned in anthropology as an
>>undergrad.  One explanation of the function of culture is that it
>>allows for adaptation to environment on a more rapid basis than
>>genetic change.
>
>>What does this have to do with consciousness?  Consciousness seems
>>necessary to make culture work.  (In some sense, culture and genetics
>
>While I agree with this assessment of culture, I would hesitate to say
>that it can be used as an explanation of consciousness.  Certainly you
                                                          ^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>need consciousness for culture to work.  
 ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

I'm not sure if that is true.  Would ants be considered to have culture or
am I confusing culture with society?

>But in my view, consciousness
>of some degree exists in many other animals (perhaps all mammals, for
>example), and culture has little significance to most of these.  It
>stretches credulity to suggest that the blind mechanisms of evolution
>had so much forsight as to create something for purposes that would
>eventually show up with the appearance of homo sapiens.

I have been ruffled by these arguments to the "forsight" of evolution.  Is
it possible that conscious evolved and had no immediate effect (neither good
or bad) so it was kept around (sort of like the appendix these days) and it
turned out to have an effect as culture developed so that those with
consciousness survived and those without didn't?  My point is that I'm not
willing to believe that evolution needed "forsight" for things to work.

A side issue on the evolution argument.  Isn't it reasonable to believe that
some things which are considered essential for modern intellectual development
could have "evolved" at a time when they were not actually useful, been
discarded, and the "re-evolved" in a time when they were an advantage.  Does
the fossil record support this hypothesis?  Just curious, maybe I should
try this type of question on one of the biology news groups, but I figured that
it had come up here so I'd give this group a shot first.

-- Brett
bfish@sequent.com
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
From: rickert@mp.cs.niu.edu (Neil Rickert)
Subject: Re: Freewill, chaos and digital systems
Organization: Northern Illinois University
Date: Thu, 20 Aug 1992 19:22:42 GMT

In article <25048@castle.ed.ac.uk> fofp@castle.ed.ac.uk (M Holmes) writes:
>rickert@mp.cs.niu.edu (Neil Rickert) writes:

>>                The physical conditions which predetermined your vote
>>was that physical substance in your brain which represents your
>>principles.  Your reasoning was completely correct.  It was your
>>principles, or their physical embodiment, which determined your vote.
>
>Ah, yes. This is good as far as it goes, *but* did you have a choice in
>garnering those principles?

I'm sure I made many choices while gathering these principles.  And all
of these choices had a similar type of explanation.  That leaves my
explanation now in very deep recursion.  Still, it is not infinite
recursion.

>                            If the principles made the decision then
>does Free Will only exists if *you chose* those principles?

You're really asking about a more absolutist notion of free will.  My
explanation of free will was really an explanation of why free will is
a reasonable interpretation.  An absolutist free will is presumably
incompatible with determinism.  It seems equally incompatible with
randomness, unless random behavior not of your choosing is your idea of
free will.
From: tim@giaeb.cc.monash.edu.au (Tim Roberts)
Subject: Loebner prize - a reaction
Organization: Monash University, Melb., Australia.
Date: Fri, 21 Aug 1992 02:33:43 GMT

Well, this seems to me to have been quite an interesting thing to do, but
quite depressing....my reactions after reading only a few lines of each are
that 1 & 4 are human, the rest (2, 3, 5, 7, 8, & 10) are programs; though 8
takes the prize for being a weird program !

I desperately hope that I'm wrong, and that either 1 or 4 is a program -
otherwise we haven't really progressed in the last 20 years, have we .... ?


-- 
Tim S Roberts
School of Applied Science                 tel:     051-226467
Monash University (Gippsland)             fax:     051-221348
Switchback Road
Churchill                                 email:   tim@giaeb.cc.monash.edu.au
Victoria 3842
Australia
From: fofp@castle.ed.ac.uk (M Holmes)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Freewill, chaos and digital systems
Date: 20 Aug 92 15:01:05 GMT
Organization: Edinburgh University

rickert@mp.cs.niu.edu (Neil Rickert) writes:

[brief summary:

You voted A at an election and if you have Free Will you could have
voted for B. Realistically though, your principles anyways actually
prevented you votinmg for B. So you couldn't really have voted for B.
Did you still have Free Will?

]


>Now think for a moment about what those principles might be.  They are
>not something mystical or etherial.  The principles consist of
>something which is encoded in your brain.  This physical substance
>which represents your principles is part of the universe, and is part
>of what determines your action.  So, yes, you decision on how to vote
>was indeed predetermined.  But it was not a sham; your reasoning was
>not a charade.  The physical conditions which predetermined your vote
>was that physical substance in your brain which represents your
>principles.  Your reasoning was completely correct.  It was your
>principles, or their physical embodiment, which determined your vote.

Ah, yes. This is good as far as it goes, *but* did you have a choice in
garnering those principles? If the principles made the decision then
does Free Will only exists if *you chose* those principles?

Just a thought :-)

FoFP
From: cpshelle@logos.uwaterloo.ca (cameron shelley)
Subject: Re: what is consciousness for?
Organization: University of Waterloo
Date: Sun, 23 Aug 1992 15:30:25 GMT

rickert@mp.cs.niu.edu (Neil Rickert) writes:
[...]
> >                                     It would indeed be interesting to
> >look at what consciousness is by looking at what conscious learning
> >does in contrast to what unconscious learning does.  Could you give a
> >couple of examples that show this? 
[...]
> When you are riding a bicycle, the procedure to turn left is:
>    turn the handlebars slightly to the right;
>    this causes the bike to lean to the left;
>    now when the lean reaches the appropriate angle, turn the handlebars
> 	left;
>    finally, when the turn is complete, turn the handlebars slightly
> 	further to the left;
>    this cause the bike to resume a vertical position;
>    when vertical, straighten the handlebars.
> Most bike riders are not consciously aware of this procedure.  In
> particular most are unaware of the initial step of turning the handlebars
> right.  Yet you have the unconscious knowledge to do this, learned by
> experience.  Incidently, being consciously aware of the procedure does
> improve control of the bike; it helps to not have the conscious fighting
> the unconscious for control.  I would characterize this procedure as
> knowledge learned unconsciously, and for most people, knowledge they
> are not consciously aware they have.
[...]
> Probably most of the semantics of our language is learned unconsciously.
> You can consciously learn a dictionary definition.  But semantics is
> much richer than that definition.  You unconsciously learn about all of
> the associations with the word from your experience in hearing and seeing
> the word in use.

So, if I understand you correctly, the difference between conscious
and unconscious learning is not necessarily what is learned or how,
but the awareness (or intention?) of learning.  At least this is the
meaning I take from "it helps to not have the conscious fighting the
unconscious for control" in the bicycle example.  It seems that
conscious learning is really learning per se, but lubrication for
unconscious learning.  But if the conscious and unconscious can be at
odds during learning, then the presence of a consciousness doesn't
seem to guarantee that learning will be more accurate or rapid, does
it?

Is it possible that, rather than providing rapidity, consciousness
provides breadth to the range of things that can be learned?

</dev/cam
--
      Cameron Shelley        |"In the beginning, there was nothing.  Then
cpshelle@logos.uwaterloo.ca  | God said `Let there be light', and there
    Davis Centre Rm 2136     | was still nothing, but youse could see it."
 Phone (519) 885-1211 x3390  | --Dave Thomas, SCTV:_Sunrise Semester_
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
From: Allen Renear
Subject: Re: Basic definitions
Organization: Brown University  CIS
Date: Thu, 13 Aug 1992 21:58:46 GMT

Gee, I have rather a different, and almost opposite, view. Though I think my
grounds are epistemological where yours are metaphysical.

I feel quite sure of things of this sort...
  -- I believe I have a hand
  -- I believe I have a brain
  -- I doubt I have a tail
  -- there is something I believe
  -- there is something I doubt that I once believed
  ... etc.

I'm not nearly so sure of things of this sort (although I believe them true)...
  -- I have a hand
  -- I have a brain
  -- I do not have a tail
  -- Paris is in France
  -- electrons are smaller than protons
  ... etc.

Since I am confident of the things in the first list I am inclined to accept
that there are beliefs and there are things that are believed. And that
suggests a sense in which it is false that "there is no such thing as
information". If you do not find these things (beliefs etc.) in a census of
elementary particles and their attendant forces, fine, but so what? 

I do hope though that there is not some valid argument that takes premises from
the second list and makes the inference that the items in the first list are
false. That would be very disturbing! But if it does come to that, then, as I
am sure that (current anti-folk-pyschology notwithstanding) the items on the
first list are more warranted than those on the second, I will recluctantly
retreat to idealism.

Oh what a monster you have created! 

In article <1992Aug10.211239.17308@access.usask.ca> choy@skorpio.usask.ca
writes:
>
>Some things have to be defined to aid the discussion on intelligence.
>
>  . information
>
>    We talk about storing information in memory, communicating it,
>    etc. In the physical universe, there may be no such thing as
>    information. When an electron interacts with another electron,
>    there does not appear to be any transfer of information. Human
>    brains are made of particles among other things interacting
>    with each other. At the lowest levels information is an
>    abstraction. It may be possible for an intelligent object to
>    use no information. At the lowest levels, nothing uses anything.
>    Things just happen. (In a deterministic universe, there may be
>    no intelligence. People can't make intelligent decisions
>    because they can't make decisions. They are forced into their
>    roles.)
>
>    I see a couple of ways to define "information"
>
>    . input, output
>
>      Information is used for communications. It's something
>      transmittable.
>
>    . computation
>
>      I look at the origins of communications. An idea is expressed.
>      For why? Some need must be satisfied. Some computation is
>      required. Meaning is the invocation of a subroutine.
>
>
>Henry Choy
>choy@cs.usask.ca
>
>
>
From: erwin@trwacs.fp.trw.com (Harry Erwin)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Freewill, chaos and digital systems
Date: 21 Aug 92 20:06:57 GMT
Organization: TRW Systems Division, Fairfax VA

Let's see.
1. There's determined and predictable behavior.
2. There's determined but unpredictable behavior. (chaos in a general
sense).
3. There's random, ergodic behavior. (time average = average over state
space.)
4. There's random, non-ergodic behavior. (random behavior, but statistics
change with time.)
5. Then there's free-will. 

How as an observer do I distinguish 5 from 1-4?

Cheers,
-- 
Harry Erwin
Internet: erwin@trwacs.fp.trw.com
From: rickert@mp.cs.niu.edu (Neil Rickert)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: what is consciousness for?
Date: 19 Aug 92 14:38:31 GMT
Article-I.D.: mp.1992Aug19.143831.14839
Organization: Northern Illinois University

In article <Bt8EJt.4pG@watdragon.uwaterloo.ca> cpshelle@logos.uwaterloo.ca (cameron shelley) writes:
>rickert@mp.cs.niu.edu (Neil Rickert) writes:
>
>Well, if you allow consciousness to exist in degrees, I don't see why
>culture shouldn't be seen similarly.  Observation of gorillas and
>other simians in the wild seems to show they communicate learned
>behaviour across generations, though not at the same level as humans. 
>And I would be the last person to tell `Mother Nature' how to run her
>business.  

I do agree that there is some culture in apes.  Actually, there is
arguably some culture in birds, as indicated by song variations.  In
most cases, I don't believe there is any persuasive evidence that there
is enough culture to be significant for survival, although the apes
might be an exception.

>[From a later posting by Neil]
>>Actually, it is my suspicion that consciousness is there to increase
>>the speed of learning.

>This then demands an answer to "what is rapid learning good for"?

I would imagine that when a carnivore is attacking its prey, and the
prey kicks it in the face, it is very useful to learn to anticipate this
so the predator can duck the next blow.  There are many circumstances
where rapid learning would seem to be highly beneficial.

>                                                         Cultural
>learning, on the other hand, has to be rapid, given the short lifespan
>of each individual who must learn it to transmit it.  As you remark,
>consciousness would be an advantage in this system if it sped up the
>acquisition of learned behaviour. 

I guess we have different concepts of "rapid learning".  Learning over
a lifetime seems anything but rapid.  Most learning of culture is quite
slow.  Dealing with crisis and emergency situations, on the other hand,
requires rapid learning.
From: erwin@trwacs.fp.trw.com (Harry Erwin)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Freewill, chaos and digital systems
Date: 18 Aug 92 16:34:58 GMT
Organization: TRW Systems Division, Fairfax VA

rudis+@cs.cmu.edu (Rujith S DeSilva) writes:

>(1) Does freewill arise solely through the mechanism of chaos?

All the answers you'll get on this one will be speculative. I suspect
chaos is part of it, but not all.

>(2) Can digital systems exhibit chaos (as opposed to simulating it to a
>    limited extent)?

Theoretically no, since a finite state machine will be periodic,
eventually. The same answer, btw, holds for quantum mechanical systems.
Huberman and Hogg showed that. Realistically, though, the terminal
sequence for a finite state machine has a length about equal to the square
root of the total number of possible states. 2 to the 16th possible states
is large enough to effectively simulate chaos. Jim Yorke has done work in
this area. I've seen more recent stuff in the IEEE transactions. 

>(3) What if a digital system is coupled to a chaotic system, e.g., some sort
>    of unstable oscillator that can be sampled to give one bit of information?

That's kind of fun. Bernardo Huberman did some work with a couple of
Brazilian colleagues where he showed that you could get chaos in a quantum
system if you coupled it with something continuous, like a temperature
bath. Don Davis (Project Athena, MIT) has also done some work in this
direction. Tom Bell and I demonstrated chaos in real (as opposed to toy)
computer systems back in 1987. (Have you ever tried to get sign off on a
system where the acceptance tests were demonstrably not repeatable?)

>Just some random thoughts that popped into my head ... comments solicited.

>Rujith de Silva.
>Carnegie-Mellon University.

>// Ivy: What Roman golfers shouted //

Cheers,
-- 
Harry Erwin
Internet: erwin@trwacs.fp.trw.com

Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy