The Total Turing Test and the Loebner Prize

II II II II II II II II II II II II II The Total Turing Test and the Loebner Prize David M. W. Powers Department of Computer Science The Flinders University of South Australia powers@acm.org Abstract The Loebner Prize is the first, and only regular, competition based on the Turing Test, but in order to stage the competition various modifications to the original test have been made. In particular, the Grand Prize has a controversial and as yet undefined Audio- Visual condition attached to it. This paper discusses the value of the test with and without the A/V condition, and makes a proposal about what the general nature of the A/V test should be. 1. Introduction and Motivation The Turing Test has always been controversial, and has been a continuing topic in AI journals and discussions since well before the Loebner Prize. We, however, will not pick up the story till after the first Loebner Prize competition was held, since this sparked a number of critical articles in both the general and the specialist media, including AI Magazine, The Economist, and multiple treatments in each of SIGART Bulletin (e.g. 3#4, 4#I, 4#4, 6#4) and CACM (Wilkes, 1992; Shieber, 1994; Loebner, 1994;. As Harnad (in a SIGART Editorial and Commentary, 1992) puts it, Turing's insight is that we can discern the intelligence of a lifelong pen pal without ever meeting him, but the Eliza and Party experience suggest that it is too easy to trick the computer, and Shapiro points out the importance of knowing that you may be talking to the computer. Our default 'charitable assumption' is that we are talking to 'a person like us'. Even in a special issue on an apparently unrelated controversy, the connectionism/symbolism debate, the issues relating to the representation of knowledge merge in with the debate about the nature ofintellegence and the Turing Test (Powers, 1993). The issue of Symbol Grounding is the bridge, and Hamad in particular has devoted considerable attention to this in bothof these forums and elsewhere (e.g. 1987, 1989, 1990, 1991, 1992), and it is alsothe issue you I wish to focus on here. I will therefore ignore the questions as to whether the Turing Test promotes dishonesty or the Loebner Prize promotes tricks, and focus on the issue ofwbetber robot- like interaction with the world is necessary to pass the Taring Test, and how the Loebner Prize should implement the Audio-Visual component of the Grand Prize which Loebner added in the face of the criticisms that the Turing Test was too shallow (Shieber, 1994; Loebner, 1994). 2. Symbol Ground and the TTT The problem with Natural Language Processing today is that it tends to amount to translation between formalisms without understanding. The original criticisms of the Loebner Prize, and earlier the Turing Test, focus on the fact that Eliza-style 'parrying' involves no understanding but can still fool the unitiated for short periods of time in highly constrained circumstances (e.g. where they have been led to believe the program …

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