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

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3520834.stm

http://www.waxy.org/archive/2004/03/23/nanniebo.shtml

and...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/badscience/

For those who can't follow links: Jim Wightman, a Wolverhampton IT consultant, claims to have developed a Turing-test passing machine, and not just that, but one capable of analysis so sophisticated it can spot paedophiles "grooming" children, EVEN IF the conversation content is non-sexual. Given that this is a difficult thing to spot even for humans, this is certainly an extraordinary claim.

So... why has the BBC and New Scientist so uncritically reported this? Or, alternatively, why is it not headline news on every paper?

Because there really are only two possibilities here:
1. It's a hoax. It's complete and utter crap dreamed up to get attention - it's nearly April 1st after all. OR
2. It's true, and it's the single most important development in computing since Babbage was a lad.

So either the BBC are credulous fools, or they're guilty of covering up the news of the century.

I know which I think it is - but I'd like to know why...

well, that sounds like a gem of an idea

Considering the standard of some if the inane chat that goes on in chat rooms it wouldn't be to difficult to programme a computer to respond to it.

Give it a sensible intelligent conversation and it would show its true colours within seconds.

Donald

It is definitely a fake. I'm not up to date on AI, so while the transcripts I've seen look very suspicious, I couldn't definitively say it's a con on that score. However, the claim that it can recognize paedophiles posing as children must be bogus. There's no way of doing the research necessary in a methodologically sound way without having to work in tandem with a horde of government agencies, none of which have come forward to triumphally claim the idea as their own.

Yes, I read about this in New Scientist with a certain amount of amazement. The example text given certainly didn't look robotic with the 'nanniebot' not only answering questions (not too hard to program) but initiating topics and offering emotional-looking responses.

That in itself is a triumph of AI but the suggestion that it can recognise patterns of responses that indicate adults posing as children or 'grooming' makes it a particularly powerful tool.

One thing that intrigues me is that if there are 100,000 of these out there in chatrooms there must be a few examples where it is talking to itself. That would be interesting to observe!

If I was a paedophile thinking of 'grooming' children in chatrooms I would be very worried: unless I was also a software expert perhaps.

F

Why would they be worried? It's not a crime to chat up a bit of software.

What's wrong with Wolverhampton? The most famous wolve, I think, was Tyla (Timothy Taylor), lead singer with The Dogs D'amour.

Ah, good ol' Black Country

much skepticism!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/36543.html

all of it founded

Relevant comment that not only is this the most advanced AI like turing test passing chat bot, you can apparently run 25,000 instances of it under Windows 2003 server.

Ha, ha and ha again. Just goes to prove that if you want to market anything, bung something in the blurb about it detecting or preventing paedophiles.

My opinion? A load of ex-shoemakers!

"Considering the standard of some if the inane chat that goes on in chat rooms it wouldn't be to difficult to programme a computer to respond to it."

An easy condescension, to which I say: try it.

Given the standard of chat that goes on in chatrooms, I think it would probably actually be HARDER to program a computer to respond to it. Bear in mind that most of those attempting to pass the Turing test expect straightforward grammatical English as the input. How much harder would the task become if one were required to be able to parse and respond to sentences peppered with phrases like "C U l8r!".

How hard would it be to write a programme to seamlessly, invisibly handle and respond to people who not only spell inconsistently, but actually deliberately misspell words as a form of argot? If you sit and think about it for a minute, it starts to sound not just difficult, but impossible, *even in principle*. Many HUMANS have difficulty following the conversations young people have in chatrooms - witness the backlash against the txtspk of the digibox users on h2g2. If humans, with their infinitely flexible linguistic abilities, can be so stumped, what chance a computer program?

Anyone interested in trying the Turing test by chatting to a bot can check out:


http://www.alicebot.org/

"chat to alice" is top left.

Alice is easy to fool, she makes all her responses based upon only the last phrase you enter. And her sentences dont always make sense. Even a 6 year old chatter could form better english than this. (ignoring vocab)


>you couldn't fool anyone into thinking your a human could you?

ALICE: Perhaps fool anyone into thinking my a human could me is beyond my present abilities.

The interesting thing about the Turing test is that you can catch out most of the chat bots by repeating the same question. They usually keep giving the same answer and never ask - as a human would - why you're repeating yourself.

Exactly, even if they give a different response it will be one from a bank of responses and they will eventually end up repeating themselves, Instead of asking why you are repeating.

Oh thank Gord, it wasn't just me. I read that article in NS and had to check the date on the cover.. had i time travelled and bought a future April 1st issue?!

I am pretty sure it is a hoax.

The scary thing is that it probably isn't a hoax.

Half-baked ideas based on swiss-cheese statistical analyses are always popular when they promise to solve problems. Take air bag restraining systems for example which kill as many as they save and maim.

A computer program that can sniff out pedaphiles is the 21st century equivalent of snake oil, magic elixirs, divining rods, lucky charms and 'divine intervention'.

That is to say it's unlikely, perhaps perposterous, but people will buy into it big time because it's a 'good thing' and they want it to be true.


~jwf~

Or possibly it's the chat-room equivalent of the speed camera. They don't have to have film in them to deter speeding.

The idea of a technology based monitor of chat-room users could be enough to deter a lot of paedophiles from using that route to groom potential victims. Of course if a lot of smarty-pants researchers start posting this kind of debunking then the plan will fail.

This is a hard job for a computer to do but not that hard for a human. Why doesn't the police recruit a lot of - carefully vetted and preferably female - volunteers who can pose as teenagers in chat rooms and watch for suspicious activity? I'm sure there are plenty of people who would spare an hour or two a week, unpaid, for this public spirited task. Perhaps a suitable reward could be a free broadband connection negotiated with one of the large ISPs?

F

~jwf~ quite right, snakeoil it is.
Reminds me of when the French Police bought some software which apparently could trawl through harddisks and websites, and actively monitor online sessions for pornographic pictures.
It was sold to them as being a statistical analysis tool which could identify which pictures contained innocent images and which were pornographic.
Needless to say the press got hold of this and the French Police suddenly went very quiet after it was mentioned exactly how hard this was.
There's at least one IT Security pundit and company that pops up regularly which does similar things.
IT Security is a massive area of opportunity for con people. (what is the PC term for conman?)

"what is the PC term for conman?" => social engineer? (I've never heard it used like that, but the process is certainly "social engineering" - like tricking someone into giving you their password or something).

I must say I hadn't thought of the "speed camera" type angle; I was inclining towards the idea that the "inventor" was just collecting "donations"/"investments" into an offshore account, ready to disappear...

Was it on here I heard about that website whose volunteers are dedicated to outing pedophiles? I can't remember the URL.

Programmer bias ..yech. Asking Alice about the question to the answer to life, the universe, and everything, she said the answer is in the Bible.