Call me Xy

3.Fake the test

Alan was furiously keying away in his Smith-Corona typewriter, a gift from his friends in America. He loved the beautiful clickety-clack sound its keys made and the "kurrrrllling" sound as he moved its carriage over the platen. The "Daily Times" newspaper lay neatly folded, untouched. It was dated 11th April 1954. The conference on Mathematical Logic in London was only a day away and his keynote speech was not yet ready.

He was interrupted by a knock on the door. "Come in please" he called out without even looking at the door. A lady, in her mid-thirties, walked in. She was Joan Clarke, Turing's former colleague, and friend from Bletchley Park, where they worked together on breaking the German Enigma code during World War II. She was now a lecturer in mathematics at Cambridge.

Joan said," Hello, Alan. I hope I'm not disturbing you. ". Alan looked behind and gave a warm smile as he walked up to her and said "Not at all, Joan. It's always good to see you. What brings you here?"

"Don't tell me you forgot. You called me for lunch and said you wanted to run by your paper for tomorrow's conference with me, a quick sanity check, is what you mentioned."

"So sorry my dear, I am running a trifle late. Maybe can we skip the restaurant and do a quick sandwich lunch right here. Let me run up to the kitchen to fix you something", an apologetic Alan pacing his way across the room. 

"Oh, please don't bother. Remember the last time you made that Sardine sandwich, I am yet to get over my stomach cramps" she laughed and added "Ill just have this lovely fruit . Oh ! Spoke too soon, is that a little worm slithering out of it?"

Alan quickly grabbed the apple from her hand and threw it onto the basket and asked "Some wine perhaps?That doesn't get bad when its old,eh?" 

The two sat onto the chairs on the round table. Alan showed her the papers he had just pulled out of the typewriter and asked "So, what do you think?"

Joan read the title "The Turing Test for Determining if Machines Can Think, Author Alan Turing".She almost gasped. 

"What do you mean computers can THINK? I suppose you know the best machines we have can barely do 4-digit multiplications. And we had to spend fifty thousand pounds on a machine just to teach it to play tik-tak-toe, which a third-grade schoolgirl ended up beating. Don't you think this is a bit outrageous?"

There was a mild humming sound from the adjoining study room with  some flashing lights. There were streams of paper strewn all over the floor. There were sputtering of electric sparks and smell of burnt rubber, from some wires which were probably getting bit over heated.

Alan seemed confident as he explained "Well, look at the progress we have made in past hundred years. It's my speculation that next hundred years we would be seeing much more remarkable advancement in these computation engines. I even predict there could be one such device with every person on this planet. Everything connected by one super intelligent machine"

Joan didn't seem much convinced and with a bit of sarcasm replied,"Well, I am yet to see a MAN intelligent enough,to understand a woman. Atleast if a machine can do that,I'd say that would be welcome. Can it also cook and feed a baby then?"

"Even better, it can compose the most original poetry"

"My dear sir, writing poems requires emotion,passion,imagination not just some mathematical calculations",Joan snubbed him.

"Language and grammar follow strict rules. And anything which has rules,can atleast theoretically,be possible to teach a machine by feeding in the parameters. Just like how a newborn child can be taught to become even a Shakespeare"

Joan annoyed added "You are truly out of your mind"

"Oh yes,that too. A machine can possibly bequeth a MIND too. To be able to think and take decisions on its own,without the need for a programmer"

Joan, seeing clearly the conversation was going into realms of fantasy."I think you should quit writing scientific papers and get into science fiction. What next time travelling machine"

Alan could sense Joan wasn't much convinced, thought he needed to explain more simply.

"You see, I don't know how this may become possible. But atleast I want to put a simple test to determine if a machine can truly reach that state."

"How exactly would you put a machine to test?"

"That's what my paper is about. There is a human interrogator,say a judge. Then we have a real human in one room,and the computer in another, both the interrogator cannot see or know ahead which is who. He asks a series of questions to both. Then he reads the response and if he cannot determine correctly between the computer and human then the machine passes the test."

"So what kind of questions can he ask?"

"Anything under the sun. Math,logic,small talk,even to paint something"

"So if I ask calculate the value of Pi, the human may not go beyond 3.14 whereas the machine will keep rattling away to infinity. Wouldn't that be easily caught. Humans have some basic limitations which machine may not.that would be a easy give away"

"True. Unless the machine knows it's being tested,and has to mimic a human to succeed So it might deliberately answer some questions vaguely, even mix a few wrong responses,maybe even claim it doesn't know the answer even if known. "

"We know no single person can be knowledgeable in several fields.So the computer, to effectively mimic a human may have to act dumb sometimes", claried Alan

Joan laughed and said "So the test for the machines intelligence is to play dumb,like a MAN. I told you so. Maybe, you should change the test to see if it can outsmart a woman"

"Maybe that day when a machine dupes a man successfully,they will probably take your suggestion", Alan smiled.

Joan sipped a little of the wine, congratulated Alan for his paper completion and took leave. Alan went back to his typewriter to give some final edits before the deadline.

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 <Back to the current day, at the studio of The Tonight Show>

Xy continued "No machine ever passed the Turing test for over 5 decades. The closest it ever came to was in 2014, when a chatbot tried to mimic a 13-year-old Ukranian boy and fooled some of the judges. So many scientists, even Nobel laureates stated AI can never be able to replicate human creativity or consciousness or causal reasoning as it is beyond the scope of computation"

"Oh, how soon were they proved wrong... very wrong. So much so that they had to even give up the very Turing test, and realized true AI need not try to be like humans anymore. It needs to be BETTER than a human. The Turing test was dead, Long live the Lovelace test.Where a particular problem was given to the computer, and if its able to solve it and even the very creators of that AI model cannot determine how it did it, became the new test for true AI."

"Let's pause here for a bit and tell me. So what makes you human ?" Xy queried the audience.

"Selecting all the images which have traffic lights" answered a little boy in the front row. The entire audience and Ellen burst out laughing, as they remembered te captcha prompt in many website forms with this 'Prove you are not a robot' test with weird image tiles one had to choose from.

Ellen chipped in "Yeah, What caused the big breakthrough? The overnight swing towards intelligent machines?"

"What triggered the breakthrough, was an outbreak. The COVID pandemic of 2020s".