Enjoying the evening...

After yesterday's noon nap, I spent some time finishing up the translation and sent it off. In particular, I'd been stumped by a term - actually, more by its context - and later came to realize (after I'd asked about it on ProZ), that a colleague of mine had asked me pretty much exactly the same question about 6 years ago. Go figure.

Anyway, by the time everything was finished, it was after 5 pm, and Lee told me she had some sort of online "appointment" to keep with some of her friends who play Threshold; some kind of "strategy summit." We went out to the local Chinese restaurant and then got back in time for her to get ready for her pow-wow.

I started to read my Linux magazines while she was online, and then napped. The next thing I knew, it was nearly 10 pm; almost too late to go see a movie. We drove to the AMC 30 near here and found only a handful of screenings available. Lee suggested we go see Brotherhood of the Wolf.

The youngster who sold me the tickets gave me a suspicious glance and informed me that the film was subtitled. (Bien sûr, c'est un film français, nommé Le Pacte des Loups.) Had the ticket-seller been a waiter, his tone would have been appropriate to inform me that the steak I'd just ordered was infested with maggots. I bought the tickets anyway and Lee and I went in.

I can't say I was ga-ga over the film, but I thought it was entertaining. One self-inflicted annoyance was trying to rely on my old, rusty French to understand the dialog so that I could look at the actors and the cinematography. My eyes kept traveling to the bottom of the screen for comprehension and, I must confess, the occasional language lesson, too.

There's a little bit of everything in the film: mysterious killings with supernatural overtones, political skullduggery, strange cures, a terrorized town, damsels who require saving, secret societies, and an Iriquois Mohawk visitor to what appears to be the early 18th-century French countryside bestrewn with fabulous geology and an ancient relic of the Knights Templar.

I think I may wait until the film comes out on DVD before watching it again, which will allow the story to fade a little from memory and technically, will allow me to eliminate the subtitles, too.

Cheers...

A long and tenuous train of thought...

It started with a posting on Slashdot, reporting that Ian Pearson, a British futurist, has produced a sort of timeline of the future, that includes the granting of rights to electronic lifeforms by 2020.

This led to a series of posts and a discussion of what an "electronic lifeform" might be. One post belittled the Turing test as an indicator of intelligence ("Day 1 we tore the Turing Test apart, proved it was more pathetic than my predictions above..."), which called forth a sharp rebuke:

If you think that successfully passing the Turing test doesn't demonstrate both intelligence and sentience, I can't deny that you may be correct. But you've got some damned serious brainpower backing the alternative position, and I really don't think that could happen if the T-test was so pathetic that a group of freshman college students could rip it apart.

The Turing test, named after Alan Turing and proposed about half a century ago, is usually set up as follows: Person A, called the interrogator, is connected via terminals to one person and one machine. A's task is to determine which of the two is the machine and which is the human only by asking questions and assessing the answers. If A, in the end, cannot tell the difference, then according to the test, the machine is "intelligent." As you may imagine, this approach has been the subject of various kinds of criticism in discussions of AI and cognitive science.

In the Slashdot discussion, the poster references one of the more famous criticisms of the T-test, Searle's Chinese Room argument, which can be summarized as follows:

Imagine you are sitting in a room with a library of rule books, a bunch of blank exercise books, and a lot of writing utensils. Your only contact with the external world is through two slots in the wall labeled "input" and "output". Occasionally, pieces of paper with Chinese characters come into your room through the "input" slot.

Each time a piece of paper comes in through the input slot, your task is to find the section in the rule books that matches the pattern of Chinese characters on the piece of paper. The rule book will tell you which pattern of characters to inscribe on a blank piece of paper. Once you have inscribed the appropriate pattern according to the rule book your task is simply to push it out the "output" slot. (By the way, you don't understand Chinese, nor are you aware that the symbols that you are manipulating are Chinese symbols.)

In fact, the Chinese characters which you have been receiving as input have been questions about a story and the output you have been producing have been the appropriate, perhaps even "insightful," responses to the questions asked. Indeed, to the outside questioners your output has been so good that they are convinced that whoever (or whatever) has been producing the responses to their queries must be a native speaker of, or at least extremely fluent in, Chinese.

The question that Searle asks is: Do you understand Chinese? Searle says NO.

The classic response to this situation is to note that just because the individual components of an intelligence (e.g., neurons in humans) don't "understand" what they're doing, that doesn't mean the entity, taken as a whole, is not intelligent.

I'd add that the judgment of the outsiders - to the effect that the responding entity is a native Chinese - is based on a lack of curiosity and observation. This is precisely the point around which the plot of the film Being There revolves. The film, which was Peter Sellers' last film, is about a mentally simple man named Chance who has spent his entire life watching television and gardening. When his guardian dies, Chance embarks on a series of adventures where he is consistently mistaken to be much, much more than he is, to the point where he becomes a man whose advice is sought by Very Important People on Very Important Issues.

In the context of the Turing test, Chance is not [really] intelligent, but his interlocutors - who are not performing the test - can't tell the difference because of their own assumptions about the world. (Great film, BTW.)

For example, going back to the Chinese Room, if the outside observers were to ask the same question two or three times, they should notice that the answer is always the same, which is suspicious behavior for an intelligent entity.

The Chinese Room situation also assumes a substantial repository of answers to possible questions, which I recall is another AI "point of contention." Techically, you see, it would seem possible to build a universal knowledge base by asking a massive series of questions and then recording "new" sets of questions and their associated answers (I once reviewed a software product named Socrates that worked like this, designed to capture information developed by help desks for use by other technicians when and if customers called about the same basic set of problems).

The idea is that eventually, you've accumulated such a huge collection of facts, you can answer almost any question. In theory, at least. In practice, the concept doesn't work too well.

* * *Working the second shift for the Execute Package is pretty slow. The primary shift is almost over; it's being worked by Alex K., who is a character. So far today, I've reviewed three of Alex's translations of radiograms that apply to the next couple of days. He's also updated me on some of the more egregious idiocy that has crept into some of the documents, from both sides of the ocean. As it is, we sit and wait for new material, which is probably not going to be forthcoming, despite the fact that there's an EVA on Wednesday.

Cheers...