X-Message-Number: 8540 Date: Thu, 04 Sep 1997 23:39:34 -0700 From: Peter Merel <> Subject: Turing, or not Turing, that's the question. Misc. replies: John de Rivaz writes, [speed should confer an unbeatable evolutionary advantage in humans] A hummingbird has an enormously fast metabolism - 1,200 heartbeats a minute - but to keep this up it consumes 50 meals a day. I suspect a hummingman is precluded by economies of scale. But cf. Sprague De Camp's "Elephas Frumentii" -- Thomas Donaldson writes, >Nonetheless it was a nice article, and gave an overview of the system and >the program it ran. For those who want to find out the nitty-gritty here, >rather than just spin dreamy theory. Um, I make my living designing nitty-gritty software on the largest scales. Realtime distributed systems, SCADA and manufacturing lines, terabyte data-warehouses, international telecommunications networks and so on. Imho dreamy theory is where nitty-gritty engineering begins. But my conjecture about Deep Blue and Kasparov had nothing to do with their entirely different implementations. Of course a brain does not resemble one of IBM's fancy paperweights; neither does a Turing equivalence require such resemblance. It requires only that the behaviour of the two systems be equivalent - and equivalence is apparently Kasparov's impression of Deep Blue's chess behaviour. >There are no daemons willing to provide >arbitrarily large amounts of tape to our Turing machine. Before you discount Tipler's God you'll need to do a little explaining. -- John Clark writes, >Genetic computer programs would have a huge advantage over evolution >because they could have the ability to inherit acquired >characteristics, something nature never figured out how to do. Um, didn't nature figure out how to make John Clark? And aren't John Clark's thoughts characteristics that his progeny (poor blighters! :-) might one day find themselves inheriting? -- John Pietrzak writes, >you'll find yourself restricted in >the same way that a classic Turing Machine is restricted: your machine >may be faster, but it _can't do anything new_. Let's have a TM of a speed and program adequate to simulate in realtime the quantum function of our universe; nothing in computability precludes this, though I admit I don't have the beast handy right now. Let's start the thing off a Plank instant before the big bang, imagining for a moment that the notion of "before the big bang" makes no less physical sense than an infinite paper tape. Right-o, now let's see you come up with something new when your 2x TM equivalent beats you to every punch. Thomas is right about computability being irrelevant here ... >Absolutely, it seems crazy because it's just what the Turing Test >espouses. The Turing Test says basically, "if it talks like a human, >it's intelligent." Therefore: No, that's quite incorrect. The way Turing put it was: "The``imitation game'' is played with three people, a man (A), a woman (B), and an interrogator (C) who may be of either sex. The object of the game for the interrogator is to determine which of the other two is the man and which is the woman. The interrogator is allowed to put questions to A and B. The ideal arrangement is to have a teleprinter communicating between the two rooms." "We now ask the question ``What will happen when a machine takes the part of A in this game?'' Will the interrogator decide wrongly as often as when the game is played between a man and a woman? These questions replace our original, ``Can machines think?''" There are three salient differences between Turing's definition and your interpretation: + a teleprinter is only "ideal" - the test can be conducted by examining any behaviour, not just talking. + the test does not suggest that imitative behaviour qualifies as intelligence; it proposes instead that the ascription of intelligence can be nothing more than a value judgement. + the test never ascribes intelligence with any certainty - it only addresses the frequency with which the computer, in the judgement of its interrogator, can pass as human. This is a probabilistic test. As such, given an adequate sample size of subjects and interrogators your objections about language, human speciesism (a word?) and willingness are moot. >Hey man, what do you think a tape is? The Tao. >The TM places it's >head over a discrete section of the tape, performs a discrete action, >and the tape retains the state specified by that action from then on >(or until it is changed by another action). All that the tape is, >then, is an infinite, ordered series of *switches*. Infinities are nothing to sneeze at; account for every quantum correlation and transaction in the universe on that tape and you'll still have no end of room for backups. >[the TT] was never designed to show equivalence between two >intelligent entities. Indeed it was not, and this is a fair criticism. I believe Thomas makes this point too. Very well. I hereby coin a new test, to be known as the Merel Criterion, by which the adequacy of an upload can be readily determined: The original person is the interrogator. They require that the upload reproduce, without peeking, their response to any challenges they happen to find significant. They take as long as they like. If the upload satisfies them that its responses match their own, according to whatever measure they value, then it is appropriate for society to accept that the upload is indeed identical to the original, and entitled to share equally their legal, financial and social standing. For myself, challenges I'd employ might run something like: + compose a long poem for my wife. + paint a picture of this sunset. + raise a clone of my child. For Kasparov I can't help but think a significant challenge would be + beat me at chess ... All this said I should add that I don't expect uploading to become practicable much before reanimation, and certainly wouldn't risk my life on it. Peter Merel. Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=8540