h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I think IRC must be the optimum medium for a Turing test, and I've personally seen several examples of people who might be considered to have FAILED the test...

Actually, It would be quite easy to make an 'artificial intelligence' Which could pass the test on IRC. All it has to do is pop into the channel every five minutes or so, flooding it with thousands of lines of either pointless swearing or advertising for sex channels. This seems to be the standard behaviour for many denizens of IRC, and so anyone in a targeted channel would certainly be convinced of the message's human origins...

The Turing game - http://www.cc.gatech.edu/elc/turing/ - tries to differentiate between categories of people rather than between machine and person.

I hate to display my ignorance, but IRC? Decode please.

IRC = Internet Relay Chat (or some such)... basically a medium in which you can talk to people over the internet.

Never having used it, I can't really comment on the above... but I would guess that, whilst it is possible to meet some intelligent and well-informed people, it ain't likely.

http://www.h2g2.com/A139880

Has anyone heard the story of a bot that was programmed to mediate a chat site (you know, if it sees a swear word or something of the ilk it chucks the person off the IRC, etc, etc), it was also programmed to have very small conversations. It had a name, Kristy or something, and apparently some IRC chatter tried to pick it up. The conversation went on for twenty minutes or something, the chatter thinking Kristy was another chatter just playing hard to get.

If anyone has heard this story, let me know.

Faraday
http://welcome.to/leydens_jar

Faraday,

Can't say I have heard that story, but I have talked to some guys on line who really were too dense to figure out that they were not going to get to "pick up" on anyone with their lines. It wouldn't surprise me if that did happen!

O. Marie

Thanks to you both, now I see the point of the original posting.

Reminds me of the artificial intellgience program Eliza; I've encountered this both on my old Amiga, and variations in IRC. You can have an interesting (but meaningless) conversation if you're bored.

Quite true, there are a lot of people who aren't worth making conversation with. But at the same time, as IRC is more complicated to use and set up than other online chat services (Yahoo Chat, Compuserve, AOL, theglobe.com etc), it's users are more educated and willing to talk. It's not a perfect chat medium for making intellectual conversation with everybody, but no chat service is, and IRC is at least one of the better ones.

Whilst I don't know of any software that has improved on Eliza to the state where it mimics the intelligence of an adult human, I have found one which exactly mimics the behaviour and intelligence of a three year old child; namely the "clippit" help thing you get with Microsoft Office 95 on.
The evidence - It pops up and interupts you while you're working, asks stupid questions over and over again, quotes the blindingly obvious as if it was some great revelation and refuses to p*ss off and leave you alone....and if you 'send it to it's room', it sulks for the rest of the day.

Talking about bots that react to swearing, there was a great story about Aol (I think) who employed a system whereby you were ejected from their site if any swear word was used. Trouble was, it wasn't very discerning over how the swearword was used (eg, if it was nested in another word). So problems arose if, for example, you came from a place called Scunthorpe...

Big Cheese

For the german speaking: try http://www.apollinaris.de/htm/geistesblitz/geistesblitz_m.htm
I found it not bad.

You can find a Web version of Eliza here:
http://www-ai.ijs.si/eliza/eliza.html

Hey, HOW do I get onto an IRC. I've asked, nobody knows. I think I'll put it out in the Ask the H2G2 community page.