Of the three tests, I found that the Alice worked the best because it responded to things very quickly, but all of them had their issues. Admittedly, this may be confirmation bias since I knew prior to clicking on the links that they were AI's rather than real people, but none of them were particularly convincing.
At their core, all three machine tests had a large flaw: they don't act; they only react to whatever the human types in. If I ask about the weather, it can parse the sentence for the word “weather”, and spit out a generic response relating to hypothetical weather conditions. It can only react to key words. For instance, I asked Alice “Do you like Metallica?”. It responded “Not since they put the pressure on Napster.”. A reasonable response, but then I ask “Do you like Megadeth?”, being another metal band that most, if not all Metallica fans will also be familiar with. The response was “No, I don't care for it.”. Use of the pronoun “it” is not the way that a natural English speaker would respond. Most speakers would refer to a band as “they”, or if they're unfamiliar with them, ask “Who is Megadeth?”.
The syntaxical errors these programs routinely make hurts their credibility. Singular and plural nouns are referred to by opposite pronouns, and the gendered pronouns he, she, and it are often used interchangeably. In addition, they're sensitive to typos. I asked Alice “Who is Barakc Obama?”, with the misspelling intentional on my part. It could not provide a correct answer. Asking it “Who is Barack Obama?” yielded the correct answer: the President of the United States.
I don't believe that a real Turing test capable program will come out within the next 10 years. At its core, the problem with these tests is that they do not react in a realistic matter. But the test itself can be brought into question. Personally, I do not see it as a meaningful test of whether or not something is capable of thought. It is a test of how well a program can react and fool the test taker into thinking it is a real person. If there was to be something I would define as thought, it would have to react similar to something like the character Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation. While incapable of emotions like anger, Data is capable of learning and adapting himself to new experiences and thought processes. The programming is not set, as he accumulates knowledge and interacts, the more information he can retain, and is then capable of autonomous action without a human initiating the action or reaction.
For this assignment, we were told to check Blogger, Wordpress, and Livejournal. I chose to use Blogger because I've used it in the past and I can easily manage it with my Google account. Wordpress and Livejournal both have awful themes and Google allows more HTML control with Blogger than the other two. Blogger also has the advantage of allowing me to use a program called BloGTK+ to write and post, so I don't have to go through logins and management just to write a post.
I don't particularly like the blogging atmosphere of today. It encourages page hits and self-righteousness over actually writing anything of substance. I should note my past a bit: I was involved at my high school's newspaper and my community college's newspaper, in both cases as one of the editors. I hate the love for quick, garbage articles over well-thought out articles, and the ego that accompanies them. Basic standards and verification are non-existent. I'd go after the Gawker Media sites like Kotaku and Gizmodo, but that's low-hanging fruit. There are other examples that are less prominent but still in need of being shown.
Take, for instance, this trash from the rag that is OBR-Hardware. OBR is a site known for simply making things up, but this has been spreading around sites like Reddit and Facebook for the past few days anyway. He doesn't even have the chip in his possession, but is calling it "crap", even if nearly all signs point to him having an Engineering Sample of a revision of the FX-8150 and not a real FX-8350. He claims he's right due to CPU-Z identifiers, but again, he does not even have said chip, and CPU-Z doesn't have support for AMD's Vishera chips.
There was also an incident a while back involving this site involving an alleged announcement of a movie version of the Mobile Suit Gundam Unicorn books being made at an Italian scifi convention. There was a lot of places reporting this, but all led back to one source, and many people had to have it explained to them that if Person B and C are both reporting something, but both are citing person A, that is not independent confirmation. Many believed it, but there was also this thread on MechaTalk full of skeptics. There was also the obvious problem of why Gundam, a Japanese series, would have a large announcement in Italy rather than Japan. Further was the problem that the convention it was supposedly announced at was a real one, but led to the problem of translation errors: something being said in Japanese, translated into Italian for the audience, then translated into English on the internet. Translation and attribution were not something these sites cared about, only page hits.
What makes this particularly amusing is that there actually was an animated version of Gundam Unicorn in the works that was announced about a month later:
It had absolutely nothing to do with the Italian convention these sites were raving about. They were claiming that it was going to be a movie or movie trilogy. It ended up being a six-episode OVA, which was recently extended to seven episodes, five of which have been released as of this writing. These same sites were claiming that while it was going to be a movie, it was going to be low-key. The OVA of Gundam Unicorn ended up being the crown jewel of Gundam's 30th Anniversary (and any Gundam fan that knew of Unicorn's plot knew it could never be anything but the crown jewel).
Further adding to this embarrassment was that a similar thing had happened just a few months before. A trailer was leaked showing some animation, and everyone assumed it was going to be an OVA:
After the date of UC0081 was shown in there, people starting calling this "Gundam 0081", keeping the naming convention from two previous series "Gundam 0080: War In The Pocket" and "Gundam 0083: Stardust Memory". Sites were raving about how this was an OVA taking place in the aftermath of the original Mobile Suit Gundam's ending. They were correct about the plot. What they got completely wrong was that it was just a cutscene from a video game.
None of these blogs made any attempt at independent verification, jumped to conclusions, and ended up completely wrong in the end. I do not enjoy what blogs create, and I hope this period of journalism passes quickly.
