Wednesday, June 18, 2014

Gran Turismo or Why You Shouldn't Worry If Someone Runs Down the Hall Shouting "I'm a Real Boy"

Or, on the third hand, the hazards of extending the bit too far.
(looking at you, SNL)
It started simply enough. Benedict Cumberbatch will be playing Alan Turing in the upcoming The Imitation Game.

That somehow devolved into "Hey, turismo in Italian means touring only with an 'O' but what Italian would ever let a vowel get in the way of a little bi-lingual wordplay and Mister Geppetto was Italian and his creation, Pinocchio said "I'm a real boy" which, in essence is what Eugene Goostman was saying in the Turing test."

See how it all sort of collapse into a hot mess of a neuronal  soufflé and leaves us with possibly the oddest intro to ever appear on this blog?

From the Financial Times:

More work to do on the Turing test
The idea that a program was able to fool a human is fanciful, writes Izabella Kaminska 
Thinking machines are ripe for a world takeover’
Financial Times, June 10
Hang on, what – Skynet from the Terminator films has gone live?
Not quite. A computer program known as Eugene Goostman was reported this week to have passed the Turing test.

What’s the Turing test?
It’s a process by which Alan Turing’s prediction – that a computer program will by the year 2000 be able to fool the average interrogator into thinking they are human more than 30 per cent of the time – is tested.

Who was Alan Turing?
The original computer scientist and father of artificial intelligence theory. He rose to prominence during the second world war at the Government Code and Cypher School, Bletchley Park, using computational machines to work out how to crack Nazi ciphers. He also came up with the concept of the Turing machine, a hypothetical computing device that can use rules to extract results from data that is passed its way. Turing died in 1954, largely uncredited for his major contribution to the war effort and to computing.

So does that mean computers are as smart as people?
Not quite. For one thing, the Turing test was never properly formalised. It was also intended only as a gauge of the progress of artificial intelligence rather than as a foolproof test determining the moment at which it arrived.

Ah, so you’re saying that it’s just an indication of improvements in the ability of computers at impersonating humans.
Indeed. But, more than that, the test won by the Eugene Goostman program was organised by Reading university in partnership with an EU-funded robotic testing organisation, according to their particular interpretation of Turing’s ideas. While it featured simultaneous tests as specified by Turing, including 30 judges, some artificial intelligence experts have since questioned whether it really met the criteria he outlined....MORE
More work to do on the Turing test
And an extension of 'Gran Turismo' in the car world is "certified" or omologato (GTO) which rhymes with Roboto which circles back around to.....
And that way lies madness.

Here's a Maserati GT:                                      And here's P-dog going all campy referential in Shrek:
Maserati Gran Turismo V8.jpg Im a real boy