Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- 1 Turing the Man
- PART ONE
- PART TWO
- Introduction to Part Two
- 7 The 2008 Reading University Turing Tests
- 8 2012 Tests – Bletchley Park
- 9 Interviews with Elite Machine Developers
- 10 Turing2014: Tests at The Royal Society, June 2014
- 11 The Reaction to Turing2014
- Index
- References
10 - Turing2014: Tests at The Royal Society, June 2014
from PART TWO
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 October 2016
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- 1 Turing the Man
- PART ONE
- PART TWO
- Introduction to Part Two
- 7 The 2008 Reading University Turing Tests
- 8 2012 Tests – Bletchley Park
- 9 Interviews with Elite Machine Developers
- 10 Turing2014: Tests at The Royal Society, June 2014
- 11 The Reaction to Turing2014
- Index
- References
Summary
Turing's imitation experiment can be regarded as a:
(a) A game for judges: to avoid being persuaded by a machine that it is human;
(b) A game for the machines: to persuade the judges that they/it are the human;
(c) A game for hidden humans: be human with all the constraints about not revealing personal identity;
(d) A game for the observer, to study and compare the results.
It is worth pointing out here that turning Turing's idea into a practical
means of examining machine thinking is fraught with problems, for example:
(a) matching the machines with ‘like’ humans for simultaneous comparison or in a viva voce experiment;
(b) lack of resources for conducting psychological tests; personality and typing speed of the Judges and hidden humans.
In the case of Eugene Goostman, a machine which simulates an English speaking young teen from Odessa, Ukraine, it is not difficult to pair the machine with a human teenager, the pair being interrogated by a teenage judge. However, what is difficult is recruiting the exact match: a teenager from the Ukraine who speaks English.
At the other end of the machine conversation spectrum, Elbot is a machine with a robot personality; it would be futile to recruit a human to act like a robot, because the Turing test is concerned with the hidden entities providing satisfactory and sustained answers to any questions.
When it comes to testing the personality of human interrogator judges and the hidden humans or checking for characteristics such as typing speed, it would add an interesting dimension to the experiment.
A Turing test is a scientific experiment in that a set of conditions, the duration of tests, the number/nature of participants – human or machine, can be put in place for observation and measurement, and be repeatable. Adding new features, therefore, would also mean new challenges.
In Chapter 8 we presented the Turing test experiment at Bletchley Park in 2012. That was concerned mainly with finding which of Turing's two scenarios for implementing his imitation game – the one-to-one viva voce or the simultaneous comparison – was harder for the machine when trying to convince the human judges that it was a human.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Turing's Imitation GameConversations with the Unknown, pp. 171 - 186Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2016