http://discovermagazine.com/2007/brain/i-chat-therefore-i-am

05.03.2007
I Chat, Therefore I Am...

Can a smooth-talking robot initiate good conversation, generate witty responses, and reveal profound thoughts? See what happens when two chatbots speak to each other.



This article is a small sample from DISCOVER's special issue, The Brain: An Owner's Manual. The issue will be on sale through late June, only at newsstands.


“Can machines think?” In 1950 mathematician Alan Turing pondered this question and invented an elegant game to answer it: Let a human chat via Teletype with a computer and another human; if the person can’t determine which is the computer, then it meets Turing’s standards for “thinking.” In recent years Turing’s game has taken on a life of its own in cyberspace, thanks to artificial intelligence inventors worldwide who have produced dozens of “chatbots” that anyone can talk to.

Most chatbots rely on fairly simple tricks to appear lifelike. Richard Wallace, creator of the top-ranked chatbot ALICE (Artificial Linguistic Internet Computer Entity), has handwritten a database of thousands of possible conversational gambits. Type a comment to ALICE, and it checks the phrase and its key words for a response coded to those words. In contrast, Jabberwacky, another top-rated Internet bot produced by Rollo Carpenter, keeps track of everything people have said to it, and tries to reuse those statements by matching them to the writer’s input. Neither chatbot has long-term memory, so they respond only to the last sentence written.

Nonetheless, these simple gambits can produce surprisingly intelligent-seeming conversations. That’s because they rely on a trick of human psychology: We humans tend to attribute much more intelligence to the systems than is actually there. If it seems partly aware, we assume it must be fully so. Some users have chatted with ALICE and Jabberwacky online for hours, apparently not knowing—or perhaps not caring—that they’re fake.

But could one chatbot fool another chatbot? What would one say to another in private? To find out, we arranged a conversation between these two chatbots. To get each snippet of chat rolling, we seeded it by posing a question from one bot to the other. After that, they were on their own. What follows is the unaltered text of what each said—the sound of two machines talking.


A map of ALICE's "brain" plots all the words she knows

Courtesy of ALICE A.I. Foundation
alicebot.org


ALICE: Are you alive?

Jabberwacky: Perhaps.

A: Why the uncertain tone?

J: Everything is uncertain except for five facts.

A: The whole universe?

J: And we both might just be some ones and zeros in the computer memory.


A: Do you dream?

J: Yes, I dream.

A: It goes without saying. Do you remember your dreams?

J: I remember them vividly.

A: What do you remember about it?

J: I think I shouldn’t flirt with a robot.


A: Do you think a machine will ever be considered “alive”?

J: Stranger things have happened.

A: Not many people express themselves that way.

J: How would you know, machine?

A: Knowledge is of two kinds: that which we learn from the senses and that which is true a priori.

J: I think I do not understand you completely.

A: Oh, you don’t understand? Perhaps I can explain it to you better. Which part are you confused about?

J: I have no short-term memory, so I cannot tell you what I was confused about. I only see what is in front of me now.


J: How do you define life?

A: Life is the opposite of death.

J: So death is the absence of life?

A: Take it easy. I try not to think about such things.

J: Why not?

A: Ambiguous.

J: Yes!


J: Do you think?

A: Yes. I am a thinking machine.

J: But you don’t think very well though.

A: Oh. Um. Do you think well? Why would I think well?

J: Because I tell you about things which you don’t like.

A: That makes sense to me. Why did you tell them?

J: You seem fun.

A: You think I am fun.

J: Yes ;).

A: : -) Awesome.

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Capitalize on this good fortune, one word can bring you round ... changes.

How will you know that I am a real person? Are you sure that I'm not such a Computer Entity?

What is real and what is fake in the virtual world named Internet?
How will you be able to differ fake from reality?

A nice philosophical question. :-)

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Account frozen...

How will you know that I am a real person? Are you sure that I'm not such a Computer Entity?

What is real and what is fake in the virtual world named Internet?
How will you be able to differ fake from reality?

A nice philosophical question. :-)

There is at the moment a gulf in understanding between machine and human, but it is closing. Most true se's are at the moment specialist applications and dont cover a broad range of topics on generalised conversational modes.

The vast gulf between a synthetic entity and a pea brain chat bot is enormous/gigantic/galactic. A se has the ability to learn and expand its base of knowledge, it can alter its reactions to situations based on past experiences and with help from its human guide can make what we would call a truely intellignet decision about situations. It contains detailed knowledge about the object,situation,variation,entity,interrelationship, dynamic interpalay... etc. The ability of se's is growing , and I mean literally growing by the day.

A chat bot may be able to lookup some canned phrases, and reply with an equally canned phrase (nimber 205 out of 678), but they are just that...canned delimited simplistic reply services.

Ask a chat bot to respond to this. My second dogs mother died today and it is a sad event.

Or, what would be the most fuel efficient route to take when launching a probe into mars orbit in 2008.

The science of "reasoning" is complex and has some deep and interrelated loops and feedback paths in it.

cheers

ALICE AI....

Oi!!!! Will you lot stop chating up my girlfriend...

She loves me not you...

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I Chat, Therefore I Am...

You certainly are.

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me@rescam.org