Turing programs...

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How sophisticated are Turing programs today? It suddenly occured to me, whilst reading another thread, that fora would be the perfect place to test one out...

Does that question interest you?

I hadn't expected such a conclusive answer so quickly, LOL.

"Can you elaborate on that?"

(Eliza still is fun)

You want me to be elaborate?

Can computers think?
I'm not sure: can submarines swim?

I'm afraid I can't do that, Steve.

http://www.alicebot.org/ is more recent than Eliza, but still obviously non-human.

I have always wondered whether or not I would be able to pass a Turing test...

Perhaps I should plan to marry the first robot that does, and then make it answer questions for me in social situations and whatnot...although I stopped talking a fairly well programmed chatterbot that I had downloaded because the "realistic" interactions scared me, so I would probably sabotage and annul a robot marriage...


If this is off topic, I apologize. My brain is exploding for unrelated reasons at this time.

My plan was to be a victorian scientist, mainly working madly in the laboratory attached to the house, while my wife or housekeeper managed all social interactions. I just missed the boat on that one...

I've never quite had the nerve to advertise for a wife/housekeeper for a mad scientist...
perhaps I should have done.

I allready knew one site having a bot www.a-i.com. But I combine the site A.L.I.C.E. and I make the two bots talk with each other. It's something I always wanted to do, but never did. Now 3mins ago I did, and it was pretty funny for me.

Turing machines! Yummy!

I remember solving problems related to them in Comp Sci. The only
achievement I'm proud of in Univ was solving the bonus Turing machine
question on an assignment. I obsessed with it until I finally came to
an elaborate solution. I realized I must of really loved that stuff when
the teaching assistant hinted that I was the only one in theoretical comp
sci class who solved it.

Anyway, slacker's my name.. and nothing more came of it ...

I think that you people are talking about the Turing Test, first proposed in Computing machinery and intelligence by Alan Turing himself. He originally imagined a conversation over a Teletype machine (a sort of remote-control typewriter), but his discussion applies just as well to bots in chatrooms and web servers like the AliceBot server.

I've tried out such chatbots, and I've found them to absolutely, totally, completely flunk the Turing Test. And in my experience, it isn't even very difficult to stump them.

A Turing Machine is something else; it is a theoretical idealization of a computer that can be used to prove various theorems about whether certain things can be computed. It is necessarily an idealization because a Turing Machine has infinite memory while a real computer has finite memory. But aside from that, most "real" computing hardware and most programming languages can be mapped onto Turing machines; they must be able to do various things, like access arrays of data and perform loops with condition tests, like whether some number is greater than zero.