Prompt #6 Evaluating Sources

Guozhuoyan Zhang

In the wake of developments in artificial intelligence, scientists and entrepreneurs (like Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk, and Bill Gates) from different fields expressed concern about the future of artificial intelligence in succession. They thought that the rapid developments of artificial intelligence might threaten human society and civilizations. The threat theory of artificial intelligence becomes more popular due to those scientists’ and entrepreneurs’ influences.

However, the innate character of the argument about artificial intelligence is that whether the level intelligence can be evaluated quantitatively. The pioneer of computer science, Alan Turing, came up with the most famous Turing Test in 1950. If there is a machine that can enter into dialogue with the human and it cannot be identified its machine identity by the human, that means the machines owns intelligence.

Turing's original game described a simple party game involving three players. Player A is a man, player B is a woman and player C (who plays the role of the interrogator) is of either sex. In the Imitation Game, player C is unable to see either player A or player B, and can communicate with them only through written notes. By asking questions of player A and player B, player C tries to determine which of the two is the man and which is the woman. Player A's role is to trick the interrogator into making the wrong decision, while player B attempts to assist the interrogator in making the right one.

As the most popular method to test artificial intelligence, Turing Test possesses its own defect. Overall, the method of Turing Test is disturbed a lot by the human factors. It depends delicately on the subjective judgments of subjects and judges. Therefore, there is often someone claimed that his program had passed the Turing Test without any rigorous proof. 

On 7 June 2014 a Turing test competition, organized by Huma Shah and Kevin Warwick to mark the 60th anniversary of Turing's death, was held at the Royal Society London and was won by the Russian chatter bot Eugene Goostman. The bot, during a series of five-minute-long text conversations, convinced 33% of the contest's judges that it was human.

However, the result of this testing has always been a controversial issue. The bot only reached 30% of the judging standard and it acted as a thirteen-year-old boy who owned English as his second language. Those kinds of program settings would make the difficulty of passing Turing Test decreased greatly.

The intelligence of human should not be treated as a single object but an aggregate status of different categories. The artificial intelligence is the same: it is constituted by lots of sets. Alan Truing’s test is only limited to evaluate some specific fields like linguistic intelligence. The test itself is unrepresentative and it still cannot satify the demand of quantitative analysis of the intelligent development level.

Cited from 

Saygin, A. P.; Cicekli, I.; Akman, V. (2000), "Turing Test: 50 Years Later", Minds and Machines 10 (4): 463–518, doi:10.1023/A:1011288000451. Reprinted in Moor (2003, pp. 23–78).

"Turing Test success marks milestone in computing history". University of Reading. 8 June 2014. Retrieved 8 June 2014.