Site Meter What I Learned Today - MG's CIP: May 2008

Thursday, May 29, 2008

Dilbert and the Turing Test

I was going through back issues of Dilbert recently and came across one where the pointy-haired manager does something idiotic (no shocker there). Dilbert makes the comment that he has just failed the Turing Test (Matt scratches his head with quizical look):

Goodbye Dilbert, Hello Wikipedia:

Turing test

The Turing test is a proposal for a test of a machine's capability to demonstrate intelligence.

Described by Alan Turing in the 1950 paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence," it proceeds as follows: a human judge engages in a natural language conversation with one human and one machine, each of which try to appear human; if the judge cannot reliably tell which is which, then the machine is said to pass the test. In order to keep the test setting simple and universal (to explicitly test the linguistic capability of the machine instead of its ability to render words into audio), the conversation is limited to a text-only channel (Turing originally suggested teletype machine; more advanced screen-based have been assumed later).

"Ah..." says Matt - "Now I get it. "

That crazy Dilbert ; )