R U intelligent like what I am? be the Turing Test. That test, proposed by the great man in 1950 was to see if a general purpose conversational machine could be made. A conversation with this machine should not be able to be told apart from a conversation with a real person. He proposed that this be done using text and onscreen chat, obviously without any other visual or audio clues to give the game away. If it was not possible to tell the difference, then a major hurdle in artificial intelligence (AI) development would be met. If you cannot tell the difference during a conversation between a machine and person then we must have reached proper AI? To quote Douglas Adams character Dirk Gently though “If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, we have at least to consider the possibility that we have a small aquatic bird of the family Anatidae on our hands.”
L33t Speak? We often covered this subject and the deeper philosophical aspects of Artificial Intelligence when I studied this as part of my university course (in the late 80’s). At that time it was quite rare for the general population to engage in text based chat. We didn’t have SMS messages on phones generally available either. So in the 1950’s this was even more far fetched and unknown. The difficulty in the Turing test was getting machines to understand the nuances of language. Using typed text gave us half a chance to build things as it removed the sort of body language and vocal intonation cues we feed
off as humans and channeled us into a domain more suited to data processing. I’m not sure this was his aim, but clearly it was making the job a bit easier. It is and was a stepping stone. What was probably not foreseen was the way in which the rapid take up of text based communication has led to a change in language, a change in the way we indicate meaning. The shortcuts and shorthand we use have evolved. We have ourselves codified some of our emotions in short text bursts. Emoticons and LOL’s are there to save us time on the interfaces we use and we have adjusted ourselves to the machines and length of the message. A test