[Debate] geez...

[strangeanimal]

... I've been to hockey games with less rules than this debate!

and gotta love Kerry (6'4") "lingering" for the handshake pics with Bush (5'11")... better hair and taller. ;)

Comments

[tsmaster.livejournal.com]

Alan Turing, back in the first half of the 20th century, described an experiment to determine if machines could think. Or, really, an experiment to determine if machines could present the illusion of intelligence.

You've probably heard of The Turing Test; short version: can you tell if the person you're chatting with online is a person or a bot? They'd been holding a contest at the Boston Computer Museum (maybe they still are). The one kinda cheesy bit, though, was that they restricted the conversations to very narrow topics. This allowed the programs to compete a little more fairly - an adult human knows an awful lot about winemaking or unladen swallows, while your typical computer program has to have a lot of programming to reach that point.

One way that you might be able to tell if you're talking to a computer program is how quickly they pull back to their prepared information. A person might repeat the same sentence for rhetorical purposes. A machine might repeat the same sentence because it's not "smart" enough not to.

Joseph Weizenbaum made a Rogerian psychoanalyst "simulator" called ELIZA (a My Fair Lady reference). As a kid, I played around with a couple versions of it, and the illusion of intelligence was pretty easy to shatter if you tried. I had an English assignment in High School to write an interview with a fictional character, and I cheated by getting ELIZA to talk to itself. This seemed like a pretty good idea until the point where the conversation looped. This only took about one printed page before the illusion was destroyed.

I wanted to go on to talk about RACTER (an abbreviation of 'raconteur' on machines that couldn't handle even 8 character filenames, if you can believe it), but I've probably already wandered from the original topic far enough.

[strangeanimal.livejournal.com]

of my friends list, only you would invoke the Turing test to describe a presidential debate. :)

[tsmaster.livejournal.com]

Oh, we were talking about the debate? :)