beaten at our own game

Let's start with the Turing test.  That's where you exchange messages with something behind a curtain and if after, say five minutes, you can't tell if it's a human or a machine, and it turns out to be a machine then it will have passed the Turing test.  What exactly will that mean in practical terms I am not sure, but it will be some kind of milestone.

Speaking of machines I went to the google and discovered, oh my lord, that some Ukrainian machine had passed the test, but further investigation revealed that that was a hoax, and indeed it appears that we are still far from making a machine that can pass the Turing test.

I breathed a sigh of relief, I guess I am not sure why, what difference does it make to me?  I guess the thing is on the one hand it would be a great triumph for mankind, but on the other side it would be a demotion of our status to little more than a machine, and a machine so simple that we could figure out how to ape it.  Of course that is what I believe, that we are basically machines, very complex biological machines, but still machines with no free will.

I was a little sad when the machine beat the chessmaster.  You know we have this whole thing with experience and insight and theories, but that damn machine, what it would do was just run through a bunch of if I make this move and my opponent does this and then I do that, long chains like that, every possible move and the consequences of every return to that and of every counter return.

Let's see, say if each chess piece has two possible moves, a low number but it will make the math easier, so each move you have 32 or 2*5 moves, your opponent has 2*5 responses for every move, so now we are at 2*10.  I believe we keep doubling the exponent every time we go one move deeper, so it's a like the doubling on the grains of rice on every square of the chessboard, only more extreme because now we are doubling the exponent,

Lots and lots of possibilities, way more than the human chessplayer has time to deal with so he does all this high level thinking rather than rote running possibilities he develops priorities and theories all that we humans prize, and yet that turns out to be no better than what a dumb machine can do without even working up a sweat.

Bummer.  But then chess, you know it is all logic, all digital, nothing but ones and zeroes which is just made for something with a byte brain.  .So that didn't effect me like when the machine won at Jeopardy.  Jeopardy is pretty stupid, but it uses that illogical device language and a rag bag of general knowledge, that irrational side of human nature which we prize because it makes us so unique.  Gave me a chill Jack..  The Turing test, it just seems like a matter of time.


I am still far from my robot army, but the hour is getting late.  I am working my way to it, but with a little more care than my previous rant.  I agree with Beagles that Old Dog should more narrowly focus his brighter newer world.
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