TDS/TCR (Breakfast of Champions)

No, A ‘Supercomputer’ Did NOT Pass The Turing Test For The First Time And Everyone Should Know Better

by Mike Masnick, TechDirt

Mon, Jun 9th 2014 7:43am

Okay, almost everything about the story is bogus. Let’s dig in:

1. It’s not a “supercomputer,” it’s a chatbot. It’s a script made to mimic human conversation. There is no intelligence, artificial or not involved. It’s just a chatbot.
2. Plenty of other chatbots have similarly claimed to have “passed” the Turing test in the past (often with higher ratings). Here’s a story from three years ago about another bot, Cleverbot, “passing” the Turing Test by convincing 59% of judges it was human (much higher than the 33% Eugene Goostman) claims.
3. It “beat” the Turing test here by “gaming” the rules — by telling people the computer was a 13-year-old boy from Ukraine in order to mentally explain away odd responses.
4. The “rules” of the Turing test always seem to change. Hell, Turing’s original test was quite different anyway.
5. As Chris Dixon points out, you don’t get to run a single test with judges that you picked and declare you accomplished something. That’s just not how it’s done. If someone claimed to have created nuclear fusion or cured cancer, you’d wait for some peer review and repeat tests under other circumstances before buying it, right?
6. The whole concept of the Turing Test itself is kind of a joke. While it’s fun to think about, creating a chatbot that can fool humans is not really the same thing as creating artificial intelligence. Many in the AI world look on the Turing Test as a needless distraction.

Oh, and the biggest red flag of all. The event was organized by Kevin Warwick at Reading University. If you’ve spent any time at all in the tech world, you should automatically have red flags raised around that name. Warwick is somewhat infamous for his ridiculous claims to the press, which gullible reporters repeat without question. He’s been doing it for decades. All the way back in 2000, we were writing about all the ridiculous press he got for claiming to be the world’s first “cyborg” for implanting a chip in his arm. There was even a — since taken down — Kevin Warwick Watch website that mocked and categorized all of his media appearances in which gullible reporters simply repeated all of his nutty claims. Warwick had gone quiet for a while, but back in 2010, we wrote about how his lab was getting bogus press for claiming to have “the first human infected with a computer virus.” The Register has rightly referred to Warwick as both “Captain Cyborg” and a “media strumpet” and has long been chronicling his escapades in exaggerating bogus stories about the intersection of humans and computers for many, many years.

Throwball

The real news below.

Tomorrow’s guests-

The Daily Show

• Thursday 6/12: Christopher Walken

The Colbert Report

• Thursday 6/12: James Webb

It’s actually quite hard to say enough bad things about Senator Sellout, Wall Street’s own Chuck Schumer.  Every word he utters is a lie, including ‘a’, ‘and’, and ‘the’.  Bring your shovels because the shit is going to be piling up.

Haute cuisine

Soylent is an open sourced food substitute intended to supply all of a human body’s daily nutritional needs, made from maltodextrin, rice protein, oat flour, canola oil, fish oil, and raw chemical powders.

Soylent was created by software engineer Rob Rhinehart; it is intended to supply all the nutrients needed by the human body without the time, money, and effort that usually goes into preparing food.

I’d call this ‘Purina Bachelor Chow’ except everybody knows that’s cold pizza and warm beer.  Breakfast of Champions, yumm.

Americans for a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow Don’t let the future happen to you!  Next week’s line up mañana (no, it doesn’t rhyme with banana).