[ExI] ai class at stanford

[Kelly Anderson]

On Wed, Aug 31, 2011 at 9:55 AM, Adrian Tymes <atymes at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 31, 2011 at 5:29 AM, Kelly Anderson <kellycoinguy at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I can live with well enough losing the quotes. Let's go with Alan
>> Turing's standard. Well enough in this case means that the simulation
>> would be indisinguishable from you by people who know you well. That
>> is, the Adrian upload would have to be able to fool your friends into
>> thinking it is really you for some period of time to pass the test. Is
>> that a little less fuzzy?
>
> Quite.  Sorry, the specific phrasing you used was strongly suggestive of
> those who attempt to deny rational discourse.  I thought it might have
> been a mistake/accident in your case, since your other posts have been
> quite coherent.  That's why I explained why I was ignoring the rest.
>
>> what I'm
>> proposing is that the test for a successful upload would be that your
>> friends could not distinguish between you and the upload for some
>> period of time, to be determined. I think that is sufficiently
>> rigorous for at least some purposes.
>
> I agree with that, where "your friends" is further defined as "the people
> who know you best and are the most able - among anyone - to tell you
> from an impostor".

It remains an open question for me whether this is easier or harder
than the generic "are you a human" Turing test. Because you could
program in a lot of specific knowledge about a specific person that
might make it more convincing. Language patterns and so forth would be
relatively easy to replicate, I think... But without actually scanning
the brain in some manner, it would be difficult to encode ALL the
knowledge of the subject... particularly private matters that would
make it easy to discover the real from the fake. For example, asking
what a particular tattoo says and where it's located or some other
private information. Anyway, it seems like an interesting question.

While I have a fair amount of knowledge in computer vision and pattern
recognition, I am sorely lacking in natural language processing... so
it's hard for me to know what's possible and not possible in written
communication for computers. Watson gives me hope that some
"understanding" is possible now... but it is not something I've
studied much. I didn't notice that it was a major topic of the
upcoming course.

-Kelly