> Kurzweil's line of questioning is not fair or normal or productive communication even if it was between two humans. A 13- year-old boy would have told Kurzweil to bugger off when tasked to answer 2+2 or wouldn't have responded at all.

That seems to make it a very good way to distinguish humans from bots even if it isn't "fair or normal or productive communication" -- if humans could detect that a line of questioning isn't "fair or normal or productive communication" and cut it off, and the chatbot can't, that would seem to be a manner in which a chatbot is readily distinguishable from a human by way of interaction.

And, I would argue, recognizing abusive, unproductive lines of inquiry and either diverting them early or cutting them off completely is an important part of human communication.

Absolutely! This sword cuts both ways. Our bots are stuck in Searle's Chinese room, performing silly input-output matching tricks without understanding language on a deep human level.

An intelligent bot would indeed recognize unproductive lines of inquiry and should act accordingly. It would be more realistic if a bot answered that it has gotten tired of answering stupid questions.

Yet: If the Turing Test was made to avoid discrimination based on appearance, then applying the Turing Test while starting out with a tricky biased (unfair, unnatural, unproductive) line of questioning in the hopes of tripping up the machine... this doesn't seem in the spirit of the Test. The chatbots are at least polite enough to try to answer. Who not extend them the same courtesy as you would other humans, at least till you "figure" out that it may be a bot?

Again: It doesn't say in the paper that the interrogator is to be made aware that player A is now a machine. The interrogator will continue its line of questioning trying to distinguish between male and female. This line of questioning should be far saner, and easier for bots to interpret and play along with. By starting out like Kurzweil he places the Test on the shoulders of the bot: The bot has to find out if it is talking to a sane human or someone spouting gibberish. Kurzweil becomes Eugene's Turing Test.

> The specifics of the Turing Test have been debated for decades. It is clear that different versions and interpretations exist, especially now we have moved on from behaviorism that was popular during the time Turing wrote the paper.

> From your quotes it only says that player A is to be replaced with a machine, not that player C is to be made aware of this replacement. I do agree that that is the popular interpretation, but it isn't written down, leading to this ambiguity.

This is Turing's own description of the test. It is clear that the intention is for the human interegator to know tha they are talking to one human and one computer, and that they need to identify the computer. Any other interpretation of this description of the test is bizarre.

The quotes you gave were certainly relevant, but still: Turing doesn't state in his paper that the interrogator is to be made aware (all I said). The rest is our modern interpretation of the test. It's a fine interpretation that I don't have a problem with, but it is an interpretation, not a criteria lifted from the paper.

In the article Kurzweil even says as much: Turing was carefully imprecise in setting the rules for his test, and significant literature has been devoted to the subtleties of establishing the exact procedures for determining how to assess when the Turing test has been passed.

It is not made clear in the paper that the intention is for the human interrogator to be made aware of possible replacement. I myself know this is not the most popular interpretation, but it still makes sense as a Test, you just check if player C is wrong as often as before. Some research has shown that unaware people change their attitude and questions, while other research has shown that for some judges this doesn't matter. Early Turing bots were tested under the interpretation that judges can be unaware. For sourcing on this see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test#Should_the_interrog...

I think one of the problems with the Test is that it was written by a mathematician and logician, while it touches on fundamental philosophical problems of consciousness and other minds. It may be valid in these pure domains of information theory, while it may be problematic in philosophy of mind. It is not sure where one ends and the other begins. Philosophers hone in on the ambiguities and omissions. They ask: "Why would Turing omit this rule, while carefully stating other rules? Is this ommission significant? Does the outcome of the test change when we make people unaware?" That is not bizarre, as much as it petty.

Another problem I see with the Test, and this may be controversial, but: Turing creates a test for intelligence and as the basis he takes the distinction between male and female. Then he replaces the male with a machine and asks us: if we lose our gender guessing game as often as before then machines can think. This assumes that Turing thought that he could distinguish males from females by questioning their intellect (as for small-talk both players could easily lie about that). Which at the time of the paper may have been realistic, but in modern times is not the case: If you have an adversarial male and a female who try to trick you, I don't think I could make a distinction at all: My guess would be as good as random.

In Turing's paper he suggests a game with a man and a woman and a human interogator. The human knows that there is one woman and one man and the interogator has to discover which is which.

Turing then suggests using this game, but with a computer instead of a woman.

It is a perverse interpretation of the paper to suggest that the human interrogator does not know that they are talking to one human and one computer.

To reach that conclusion you have to mangle the meaning of normal every day English words.

Perverse interpretation? That made me laugh a bit.

The facts: Turing did not state in his paper that the human interrogator is to be made aware of the replacement.

The interpretations: Some more perverse than others :)

You don't need to mangle the meaning of normal every day English words, though philosophers like to. It's remarkable that modern Turing tests are not carried out exactly as described in the paper, yet people lay claim to their interpretations and versions as being better somehow.

See http://crl.ucsd.edu/~saygin/papers/saygin-jop.pdf for two views that support my point:

- For communication to be meaningful, communicators should act rational. Be relevant, avoid obscurity, needless repetition, social faux pas and ambiguity. Following Paul Grice's principles you get more normal and effective communication. This is significantly different from trying to trick a machine using obtuse, ambiguous, repetitious, weird communication. Remember: the original test was for player A and B to trick player C. Kurzweil's test is for player C to trick player A into revealing it is a bot.

- They created an entire chapter on bias (prior knowledge that the person was possibly talking to a machine). This shows that it is not a marginal view, but actually a view that makes a difference and has (philosophical) consequences. Subjects do not report thoughts that "this may be a computer", but they think: Person A is mentally ill or handicapped, on drugs, a child or very confused.

To conclude this discussion from my part: I think the modern Turing Tests as inspired by Loebner are fine. However they are not true to the paper in multiple ways, and they assume rules/criteria which Turing omitted. As for validity and philosophical importance of adding this criteria, the onus is on those that add it to prove its worth. If this is a pragmatic criteria to test machine intelligence, then just admit to it. Don't take the original paper and say that Turing omitted something, and that you should interpret and fill in the blanks in a certain way, else you are being perverse. As an aside: I muse about the inspiration for the test. I think it may have come from Turing playing 2-ply chess on a computer terminal. If unbeknownst to Turing a Grand Master would start relaying the moves mid-game, would Turing have noticed, and would Turing have noticed it in the near future? Though computers beat GM's nowadays, GM's still have correct suspicions when playing against an opponent using computer aid: The lines are too perfect, alien or far-fetched. It's interesting that even though artificial intelligence is already better at natural language processing and games of chess, it still does not suffice as human enough for some of us.

> Remember: the original test was for player A and B to trick player C.

NO. This conversation is very frustrating. Stop using other different papers. Re-read the Turing paper.

It is very clear that the aim is for the interrogator to discover the woman/computer, and that the male/human can cooperate with the interrogator.

Turing made it very clear that you repeat the game but that you replace "woman" with "computer". It is impossible to do this without telling the interrergator that they are playing against a computer.

You keep saying that Turing did not explicitly say that the human should be made aware of the computer. But he did say that - by repeating the game but substituting "computer" for "female" you inform the interrogator the same way in both games. In the first tame you say "spot the woman" and in the second game you say "spot the computer". Unless you're saying that you don't tell the interrogator that one of the talkers is a woman.

Here, again, is the quote:

Your quoted error above makes me think that you have mot recently read Turing's paper and so I won't waste any more time discussing it.

You are frustrated and you now want to bring some of this frustration over on me, which is, sadly, effective. Since this discussion has been between us for a while now, and it became so "heated" as to lead to frustration, I think it is time we took a step back and reflect. In the meantime I'll read the paper again. I'll throw in a bone, because I only meant to point to the omission as an interesting curiosity, not to defend it to the bitter end with quoted errors: DanBC you are right (or less wrong). Or maybe, as luck would have it, we are both right (yet wrong for this long discussion), and Turing himself was wrong or confused when he wrote the paper: "The Turing Test: The Elusive Standard of Artificial Intelligence" speaks about two Turing tests: http://www.library.wisc.edu/selectedtocs/be076.pdf