Huma Shah

A series of imitation games involving 3-participant (simultaneous comparison of two hidden entities) and 2-participant (direct interrogation of a hidden entity) were conducted at Bletchley Park on the 100th anniversary of Alan Turing’s birth: 23 June 2012. From the ongoing analysis of over 150 games involving (expert and non-expert, males and females, adults and child) judges, machines and hidden humans (foils for the machines), we present six particular conversations that took place between human judges and a hidden entity that produced unexpected results. From this sample we focus on features of Turing’s machine intelligence test that the mathematician/code breaker did not consider in his examination for machine thinking: the subjective nature of attributing intelligence to another mind

The purpose of this paper is to consider Turing's two tests for machine intelligence: the parallel-paired, three-participants game presented in his 1950 paper, and the “jury-service” one-to-one measure described two years later in a radio broadcast. Both versions were instantiated in practical Turing tests during the 18th Loebner Prize for artificial intelligence hosted at the University of Reading, UK, in October 2008. This involved jury-service tests in the preliminary phase and parallel-paired in the final phase.

Response to Floridi et al, 2008/2009. Based on insufficient evidence, and inadequate research, Floridi and his students report inaccuracies and draw false conclusions in their Minds and Machines evaluation, which this paper aims to clarify. Acting as invited judges, Floridi et al. participated in nine, of the ninety-six, Turing tests staged in the finals of the 18th Loebner Prize for Artificial Intelligence in October 2008. From the transcripts it appears that they used power over solidarity as an interrogation technique. As a result, they were fooled on several occasions into believing that a machine was a human and that a human was a machine. Worse still, they did not realise their mistake. This resulted in a combined correct identification rate of less than 56%. In their paper they assumed that they had made correct identifications when they in fact had been incorrect.

In this paper, we look at the possibility of a machine having a sense of humour. In particular, we focus on actual machine utterances in Turing test discourses. In doing so, we do not consider the Turing test in depth and what this might mean for humanity, rather we merely look at cases in conversations when the output from a machine can be considered to be humorous. We link such outpourings with Turing’s “arguments from various disabilities” used against the concept of a machine being able to think, taken from his seminal work of 1950. Finally we consider the role that humour might play in adding to the deception, integral to the Turing test, that a machine in practice appears to be a human.

This paper presents some important issues on misidentification of human interlocutors in text-based communication during practical Turing tests. The study here presents transcripts in which human judges succumbed to theconfederate effect, misidentifying hidden human foils for machines. An attempt is made to assess the reasons for this. The practical Turing tests in question were held on 23 June 2012 at Bletchley Park, England. A selection of actual full transcripts from the tests is shown and an analysis is given in each case. As a result of these tests, conclusions are drawn with regard to the sort of strategies which can perhaps lead to erroneous conclusions when one is involved as an interrogator. Such results also serve to indicate conversational directions to avoid for those machine designers who wish to create a conversational entity that performs well on the Turing test.