This morning, the Loebner Prize is being contested at Bletchley Park, the location outside of London where Alan Turing and other British code breakers successfully cracked Nazi encryption. The Loebner Prize is described on their web site as follows:
The Loebner Prize for artificial intelligence ( AI ) is the first formal instantiation of a Turing Test. The test is named after Alan Turing
the brilliant British mathematician. Among his many accomplishments was
basic research in computing science. In 1950, in the article Computing Machinery and Intelligence which
appeared in the philosophy journal Mind, Alan Turing asked the question
"Can a Machine Think?" He answered in the affirmative, but a central
question was: "If a computer could think, how could we tell?" Turing's
suggestion was, that if the responses from the computer were
indistinguishable from that of a human,the computer could be said to be thinking. This field is generally known as natural language processing.
In 1990 Hugh Loebner
agreed with The Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies to underwrite a
contest designed to implement the Turing Test. Dr. Loebner pledged a
Grand Prize of $100,000 and a Gold Medal (pictured above) for the first
computer whose responses were indistinguishable from a human's. Such a
computer can be said "to think." Each year an annual cash prize and a
bronze medal is awarded to the most human-like
computer. The winner of the annual contest is the best entry relative to
other entries that year, irrespective of how good it is in an absolute
sense.
I've been interested in artificial intelligence for many years and at one point I wrote a modest program designed to give human-like responses. While my program is not sophisticated enough to be entered in the competition for the Loebner Prize, I thought that, in honor of the Loebner Prize, I might try it out this past week, using my neighbor here in Florida as the human who would give answers to my questions that I could then compare with answers from my computer program. The results are shown below. I've labelled the responses "A" and "B". Can you tell which is the human and which is the computer?
Question: Why is Donald Trump doing so well in the polls?
A: He will make America great again.
B: He is cynically telling stupid people what they want to hear.
Question: Is President Obama a Muslim?
A: Yes of course.
B: No, he is a Baptist Christian.
Question: Where was President Obama born?
A: Kenya.
B: Honolulu, Hawaii.
Question: What should we do about the problem of illegal immigration?
A: Build a wall.
B: Grant young illegal immigrants the right to work in the U.S.
Question: What should we do about Putin?
A: Try to get along well with him.
B: I don't understand the question.
If you guessed that A was the human and B the computer program, you're right, of course. This is just my admittedly simplistic program, and the programs competing for the Loebner prize are much better. Even so, as you can see, computer programs have a long way to go before they can match human intelligence.
