Who Were the Sea Peoples?

Is that any analogy must differ from the situation to which it is analogous in some ways, or it would just be that situation. This problem is especially tricky when dealing with people in the grip of an ideology, because inevitably, what they will do is seize upon one of these differences, and play it up as if the fact there is some difference makes the analogy worthless. (Of course, if that were true, every analogy would be worthless, because, as I said, there is always some difference.) And so it went with my first round of Turing Test analogies . The point of the whole exercise was to show that black box tests don't tell you anything about where in a system the intelligence lies. If a computer passes the test, I would agree that is evidence that there is intelligence somewhere in the system! Furthermore, I can tell you just where that intelligence lies: it is with the programmers who built the program that enabled the machine to pass the test. Just like there is intelligence...

I recently gave some analogies to show the emptiness of the Turing Test in terms of deciding whether a computer is intelligent or not. Commenters managed to find some completely irrelevant ways in which my analogies were not exactly like the Turing Test. One of them went so far as to claim that the Turing Test wasn't about deciding whether computers are intelligent. In that case, fine, I can stop writing about it. But it certainly is used that way, again and again, by people who want to be able to claim, "Well, a computer passed the Turing Test, therefore, it is intelligent!" In any case, I thought I would offer and even closer analogy, to make it harder for AI devotees to evade the main point of these examples. (That they will  try to evade it, I have no doubt, for the will to believe is strong!) So let us consider the equivalent of a Turing Test for simulated battles, such as those in The Lord of the Rings . In this case, the analogous test will involve having t...

The idea behind the Turing Test is that we must evaluate the possible intelligence of anything we encounter as though that thing were a black box. So let us do a "Turing test" to decide who is the most knowledgable high school history student in the United States this year. Preliminary competitions have narrowed the field down two candidates: Jamal, who comes from a poor family, and Emily, who is from a wealthy one. Per Turing, we must set each student within a black box from which that student's answers will emerge, and we are simply not allowed to inquire at all what is going on within that box. Jamal's parents, being poor, and trusting in the honesty of the contest, simply put Jamal in his box. But Emily's parents, knowing the way the world works, and being rich, hire a dozen top historians from around the world to sit in Emily's box with her.  Every time a history question is asked, Jamal answers the question himself, but Emily asks her team what the ...