On Wed, 20 Jun 2018 17:55:07 -0400 Steve Kinney wrote:

On 06/20/2018 05:30 PM, juan wrote:

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On Wed, 20 Jun 2018 08:04:01 -0300 Cecilia Tanaka wrote:

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Computers beat humans at chess in 1997, beat humans at Jeopardy in 2011, and beat the world's best Go players in 2017. This Monday, a computer won a far more nuanced competition: debate.

sorry let me rephrase :

...

a computer won

so what does that mean? What are the implications of that particular piece of fake news, and glaringly absurd 'fact'? Why is the fake-news-meme 'computer won debate' being pushed? What's the 'tactic and strategy' behind this round of psychological warfare?

FTA:

"In one debate, Noa Ovadia overall nudged two people among a few dozen in a human audience toward her perspective that governments shouldn't subsidize space exploration. But in the second, Project Debater soundly defeated Dan Zafrir, pulling nine audience members toward its stance that we should increase the use of telemedicine."

So maybe AI performs best when advocating for the superiority of its fellow machines. :D

oh so 'won debate' means : a bunch of naturally retarded, politicaly iliterate, corrupt humans 'voted' for the 'computer' because it promised them more 'free' stolen money. I admit I didn't bother reading beyond the first paragraph of the article and I admit I didn't expect it to be *that* crass.

The gadget in question managed to win a popularity contest of sorts.

by using a time-honored and vulgar technique known as vote buying.

As such I think this does indicate continuing advancement on the Turing Test front.

such test beign a meaningless metric for 'intelligence'

If industrial 'civilization' lasts another decade or so, I expect to see AI successfully emulate human conversation -

meaning what? Back to the propaganda piece, let's apply some basic philosophy to it "Computers beat humans at chess" - Yes, just like a $1 calculator used at the grocery store can 'beat' humans at adding the price of potatoes and 10 other items. Also, "beat[en] at chess" (or other games) is a state clearly defined by the rules of the games, described in mathematical terms. But there's of course no equivalent mathematical description for 'won debate'. It also just happens that human debate *requires* things like intelligence, consciousness and agency which a string parsing system or 'computer' lacks.

depending of course on context. Where a clever human suspects an AI masquerading as human, a few well calculated questions should give the AI real problems. Which means, real learning opportunities...

for whom? - not for a machine that just puts sentences together. That thing can't 'learn' and lacks 'intelligence'.

:o)