History of Conversation Systems: FromElizatoEugene Goostman

Abstract

In the following sections we consider early artificial conversationalists and implementations of experiments to answer Turing's question can a machine think? . The claim for the first Turing test is asserted by Hugh Loebner, sponsor of the annual Loebner Prize for Artificial Intelligence. The first contest appeared in 1991. However, more than a decade earlier a computer program of a paranoid human confounded psychiatrists: they were not able to distinguish the simulation from a real patient (Heiser et al., 1979). As we said in the previous chapter, during a practical Turing test, the actual goal of the machine is to provide satisfactory and sustained answers to any questions – in the realm of paranoia, PARRY , the program created by Colby et al. (1971, 1972), served this purpose. Christopher Strachey, a contemporary of Turing and a fellow student at King's College Cambridge, in 1952 wrote an algorithm that generated text intended to express and arouse emotions. It was the first machine to produce digital literature (Wardrip-Fruin, 2005). Here's an example of its output: DARLING SWEETHEART YOU ARE MY AVID FELLOW FEELING. MY AFFECTION CURIOUSLY CLINGS TO YOUR PASSIONATE WISH. MY LIKING YEARNS FOR YOUR HEART. YOU ARE MY WISTFUL SYMPATHY: MY TENDER LIKING. YOURS BEAUTIFULLY. The distinguished linguist Noam Chomsky (2008) viewed the linguistic performance of a machine preferable to other ways of improving machine capacity and studying human intelligence. He considered that the Turing test provided a stimulus for two useful lines of research: (a) improvement of the capacities of machines; (b) investigating the intellectual properties of a human. Chomsky believed therefore the imitation game is uncontroversial. He accepted Turing's intention as wanting to learn something about living things through the construction of a thinking machine. Moor (2004) contended that Turing's linguistic measure “is not essential to our knowledge about computer thinking … it provides one good format for gathering evidence” so that if a machine were to succeed against Turing's satisfactory and sustained response criterion “one would certainly have very adequate grounds for inductively inferring that the computer could think”.