3255 Tests - Medical and Turing

Wednesday, February 9, 2011

"When you are a minority voice, you begin to doubt your own competencies."
-- Catherine Orenstein, on the fact that only 13% of Wikipedia's contributors are female --

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I got a call from the doctor's office. The blood and urine results are back.

• I do have a UTI, and they'll phone a prescription to my local CVS.
• Glucose was 100 mg/dL, but since I was not fasting, that's ok, I guess.
• Vitamin D was low, so I'm to add a D supplement, twice a day.
• Total cholesterol was a bit high, so I'm to add flax seed oil. (but the ratio is low - in the very good range. The medical community differs on what that means, but it's been like that with me for ages, so I figure it must be ok. Besides, I don't know how I can possibly cut any more fats from my diet.) I was taking flax seed oil for a while, back when, but it makes me burp. Oh, well. I'll try again.
  
• Triglyceride is 99.
• And the real shocker - thyroid stimulating hormone is normal. Huh?

Sigh.

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I was reading an essay on the Turing test (http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1969/12/mind-vs-machine/8386/3/). That's the dealy where a tester converses with a human and/or with a computer, and attempts to determine whether what he's conversing with is human or machine. The author participated in a test, and began to wonder what makes someone recognizably human.

An interesting observation was in the area of arguments. Humans, when arguing, tend to devolve into verbal abuse, and to begin simply reacting to the last statement, without regard to the full context of the argument, ignoring previous statements.

That kicked off thoughts. I hate arguing with people, precisely because with most people, that happens. They want to turn it into a sniping match, and I just won't do that. For that reason - that I keep going back to the initial disagreement, and ignore and won't react to sniping - they seem to feel that I don't argue fairly. I don't get it.

Think about the last argument you've had. Did you get off track, and just snipe?

To quote from the essay:

...argument is stateless—that is, unanchored from all context, a kind of Markov chain of riposte, meta-riposte, meta-meta-riposte. Each remark after the first is only about the previous remark. If a program can induce us to sink to this level, of course it can pass the Turing Test.

Once again, the question of what types of human behavior computers can imitate shines light on how we conduct our own, human lives. Verbal abuse is simply less complex than other forms of conversation. In fact, since reading the papers on MGonz, and transcripts of its conversations, I find myself much more able to constructively manage heated conversations. Aware of the stateless, knee-jerk character of the terse remark I want to blurt out, I recognize that that remark has far more to do with a reflex reaction to the very last sentence of the conversation than with either the issue at hand or the person I’m talking to. All of a sudden, the absurdity and ridiculousness of this kind of escalation become quantitatively clear, and, contemptuously unwilling to act like a bot, I steer myself toward a more “stateful” response: better living through science.

A slimmed-down version of the "most human" computer winner of 2010 is online, and you can chat with "him" at http://www.cleverbot.com/. I've had a few conversations, and very often felt like I was talking to a human. Warning - Cleverbot can get a bit naughty.

From the Cleverbot site:

A special version of the Cleverbot application has won the BCS Machine Intelligence Competition 2010, after taking part in a quick-fire Turing Test.

Cleverbot was running with notably more power behind it than is possible for the online version, with 24 separate instances conferring on their answer.

10 volunteers talked for 2 minutes each using a plain text interface, and the whole of the event audience voted on 'how human' each conversation appeared to be.

Cleverbot achieved an average rating of 42.1% human!

I believe that means 42.1% of the testers thought Cleverbot was human (as opposed to the real human competing against Cleverbot), and that means it actually passed the Turing test.
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