An unnecessary
focus, that does not ‘sex-up’ Turing’s imitation game, rather detracts from Alan
Turing’s brilliant ideas on building
machines to think, is the notion that machines in practical Turing tests
require 30% deception rate for success. This is a misinterpretation of one of
Turing’s predictions:
"...in about fifty year’s time it will be possible to programme computers,
with a storage capacity of about 109, to make them play the
imitation game so well that an average interrogator will not have more than a 70
per cent. chance of making the right identification after five minutes of questioning”
(Computing Machinery and Intelligence,
1950, p.442).
If that statement is to be interpreted as 30%
interrogator deception rate for machine success then it has already been
surpassed, in the very first Loebner Prize for Artificial Intelligence in 1991:
“….the
highest-ranked computer program was misclassified as a human by five of the ten
judges” (by Robert Epstein in his chapter ‘The Quest
for the Thinking Computer’ in R. Epstein, G. Roberts & G. Beber Parsing the Turing Test, Springer, 2008,
p. 3).
Turing’s success rate required a machine to
provide “satisfactory and sustained” answers, not an “easy contrivance” (A.M.
Turing, in Computing Machinery and Intelligence,
1950, p. 447), to any questions put to it by a jury panel of interrogators, and
that:
“a considerable proportion of a
jury, who should not be experts about machines, must be taken in by the
pretence” (A.M. Turing, in ‘Can Automatic Calculating Machines be Said to
think’, p. 495 in B. J. Copeland’s The Essential Turing, OUP, 2004).
To me, a
considerable proportion should be more than the rate of chance - this is not ‘moving
the goal post’, because half the number of ten judges were deceived in one
practical Turing test event (see above, 1991). To do Turing’s ideas justice and
to inspire and motivate machine developers, not less than 70% of a jury panel of
interrogators should feel the conversational skills of their hidden
interlocutor are human-like in any robust Turing test experiment.
The challenge is to attain funding for a full, large–scale Turing test experiment with hundreds of “average interrogators” –
that is, all ages of novices and expertise levels - taking part in thousands of tests run
over weeks and weeks.
Until that happens practical
Turing tests serve many purposes, from measuring machine performance against a
human’s in any field, to encouraging/inspiring children to take up computing
and robotics. It is also a useful experiment helping to raise awareness and
prevention of cybercrime. It is estimated that the cost of cybercrime to the
individual is over £3bn* - the full amount is probably not known because people may not
always be willing to come forward and report to the police admiting they have had their identity stolen or
bank accounts compromised, for fear of appearing foolish at being deceived in
cyberspace. There is also the task of making more children prepared to
distinguish adults from peers in cyberspace to ensure they do not succumb to
grooming on the Internet^.
Reading University (Visiting Professor Kevin
Warwick and Dr. Huma Shah) and Coventry University (Deputy Vice
Chancellor-Research, Professor Kevin Warwick) are collaborating to host another public Turing test experiment, following on from the June 2012 experiment on
the 100th anniversary of Alan Turing’s birth at Bletchley Park.
Details for this year's event:
Public day: Saturday 7 June 2014
Timing: 10am - 6.30pm
Follow on Twitter here: @Turing2014
Event animated trailer on YouTube is here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Hgw9RVwbaw&feature=youtu.be
© Huma
Shah, 16 April 2014
