The Turing Test - like magic!

Clarke's Third Law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic

Finally, an invocation of the Turing Test which doesn't lie down in fawning adulation, which doesn't assume the Turing Test is the judge of intelligence, artificial or otherwise.

First, the Turing Test is a well accepted method for judging creation of a successful Artificial Intelligence (those capitals are ironic, because artificial intelligence is mostly not HAL 9000). To generalize, the test is really that if a human believes the human source of the test data, then that is successful Artificial Intelligence. The canonical test is a teletype (so that the mechanics of communication is not in question). A person communicates back and forth over the teletype. If that person can't tell if the conversation was with a machine producing the words (presumably by the machine mimicking a human's ... uh.... humanity, rather than being hyperlogical, then success.

It is great fast thinking on Turing's part, going quickly to a workable solution, cutting out lots of junk rationalizations, don't concern oneself with the infinite hypotheses of the underlying processes, just go for the jugular of what you have, the surface behavior and believability.

But frankly it is no different from bald anthropomorphism; if the animal acts like a human it must be human-like more deeply, with the lesson that doing so is usually not very successful. (But contrarily, a subject for another time is that I think many vertebrates share many cognitive abilities of humans, and also contrarily, some behavior that is usually considered special human intelligence may have very low complexity biological mechanisms that underlie them).

Not only is the Test the basis of countless scifi plots, but also countless dumbed-down explanations of artificial intelligence machines.

If it acts like a human then it -is- a human.

Basing success on limited explicit experience rather than looking behind the curtain and seeing the design? That is just plain idiotic. It is denial of common sense. The true test of whether something is artificial or human is by looking behind the curtain, by looking inside the blackbox, by seeing how it is designed. The design is the thing that should be judged, not the paltry examples.

Finite behavior doesn't define essence. The essence defines essence. Sure there's a lot more, the rules create the instances and anecdotes which are telling, but it's the all possibilities that are relveant, not just the small handful of instances.

A counter argument might be that telling essence is not the point, and that knowing essence is not available. So that experience is finite and is all that can be known sometimes (you can't always look inside the blackbox).

Here are two analogies that express my point. Generating genre texts with ngram probabilities (using markov models or deep learning), and generating biological objects using fractals. Here's an example of generated text (from Paul Masurell):

Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austeen.

I do not. It is very much at Pemberley. The idea of their all walking out. I must acknowledge to you. When I do not marry Mr Collins had promised herself. But you have the carriage might be copied. It would look odd to be proud. You are perfectly good. Elizabeth was at the sight of Miss Darcy was delighted. You have no objection to my charge. I know not. Lydia was urgent with the keenest of all. Mr Collins, you puzzle me exceedingly. But, my proposals will not go. To the rest. But, to much conversation, no traces of them.

The results look vaguely like the real thing, and could totally pass for reality (as long as they're not inspected too closely). Also, some humans using all their own skill can only each this level of coherence. So this is a terrible example? Turn up some dials and it gets less and less 'wandering' and more coherent.

Here's another example: Fractal trees. take a visual object like a line. Tack on smaller versions of that line to itself. Repeat to each smaller tree ad infinitum. You get a fractal tree like:

(from Gurpreet's blog. he has code!)
Depending on the rule, the 'tree' can look fluffier or sparser, and more regular or irregular. And it looks so much like a real tree:

(from Sarah Campbell)
And one could go the other direction and say that nature is implementing a recursive algorithm to grow its trees. But this is obviously crap. It certainly looks like a fractal, and I'm sure there are biological processes that can be modeled by some limited nesting (see the Chomsky/Everett disagreement over Piraha). But we know the fractal trees are not made by biology but by an algorithm, and that similarly a broccoli shaped tree whose trunk and branches and branches of those has to stop at some depth to give leaves.

It's like magic tricks: they work on the toy problem (having a card you're thinking of pulled out of a just-cut-up lemon) but don't generalize at all to anything beyond.

So you can make an elephant disappear on stage? Make it really disappear. It all looks right that one time, but is not repeatable because the reality isn't there.

Here's another example, IBM's Deep Blue chess playing program. So what if it wins against a human? (or plays at all). It's not magic. It's simply following game paths. Many game paths.

The Turing Test works in very limited contexts but is superficial.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo.  James Klass