An IQ test for computers: does it tell us how smart the computer is, or how dumb humans are?

 A Russian computer fooled 33% of people who engaged in an online chat into thinking it was a thirteen-year-old boy who didn't speak English very well.  But really, how hard is it for a computer to fool the least-intelligent third of humans that it is one of them?

 

Computer program fools humans, allegedly passes Turing test

A team in Russia claims its chatbot managed to dupe more than 30 percent of human interrogators into believing it's human. Are they to be believed?

by Chris Matyszczyk
cnet.com

June 8, 2014

It wasn't Siri, nor a souped-up Scarlett Johansson.
However, it seems that artificial intelligence may have gone even further toward a time when it will fool us that it's just like us. Emphasis on the "may have."
A Russia-based team claims to be the first to create a program that passed the Turing test. Named after Alan Turing -- who died on June 7, 1954 -- the challenge is to persuade a minimum of 30 percent of humans that the computer program is a real person.
As the Independent reported, in tests conducted at the Royal Society in London, the Eugene Goostman program managed to persuade 33 percent of people that it was a 13-year-old boy from Odessa, Ukraine.
The event was organized by the University of Reading. The university insisted that this is the first time the Turing test has been passed with flying deception.
Professor Ken Warwick, a visiting professor at Reading, said in a press release: "Some will claim that the Test has already been passed. The words Turing Test have been applied to similar competitions around the world. However this event involved the most simultaneous comparison tests than ever before, was independently verified and, crucially, the conversations were unrestricted. A true Turing Test does not set the questions or topics prior to the conversations. We are therefore proud to declare that Alan Turing's Test was passed for the first time on Saturday."
There's a certain convenience in pretending you're a 13-year-old boy, of course. You can fool people more easily because, unlike IBM's Watson, you don't have to pretend you know everything. Rather you have to have a very well-designed "dialog controller."
The man behind the boy, Vladimir Veslov, explained: "This year we improved the 'dialog controller,' which makes the conversation far more human-like when compared to programs that just answer questions. Going forward we plan to make Eugene smarter and continue working on improving what we refer to as 'conversation logic'."

...Those who are gullible to such things, though, are often those who think nothing right now of sending an online date whom they have never met huge sums of money.
The woman who was duped into wiring $500,000 to someone she'd met on a Christian dating site is but one example.
It's true, though, that as AI progresses, we'll be forced to think at least twice when meeting "people" online...

That Computer Actually Got an F on the Turing Test

• By Adam Mann  
• Wired
• 06.09.14  

Alan M Turing and colleagues working on the Ferranti Mark I Computer in 1951. Photo: SSPL/Getty Images

Over the weekend, a group of programmers claimed they built a program that passed the famous Turing Test, in which a computer tries to trick judges into believing that it is a human. According to news reports, this is a historic accomplishment. But is it really? And what does it mean for artificial intelligence?
The Turing Test has long been held as a landmark in machine learning. Its creator, British computer scientist Alan Turing, thought it would represent a point when computers would have brains nearly as capable as our own. But the value of the Turing Test in modern day computer science is questionable. And the actual accomplishments of the test-winning chatbot are not all that impressive.
The Turing Test 2014 competition was organized to mark the 60th anniversary of Turing’s death and included several celebrity judges, including actor Robert Llewellyn of the British sci-fi sitcom Red Dwarf. The winner was a program named Eugene Goostman, which managed to convince 10 out of 30 judges that it was a real boy. Goostman is the work of computer engineering team led by Russian Vladimir Veselov and Ukrainian Eugene Demchenko.
The program had a few built-in advantages, such as the fact that he was claimed to be a 13-year-old non-native English speaker from Ukraine. It also only tricked the judges about 30 percent of the time (an F minus, or so). For many artificial intelligence experts, this is less than exciting...

Human Intelligence Has Declined Since Victorian Era, Research Suggests

People Getting Dumber? Human Intelligence Has Declined Since Victorian Era, Research Suggests
The Huffington Post
By Macrina Cooper-White
05/22/2013

Our technology may be getting smarter, but a provocative new study suggests human intelligence is on the decline. In fact, it indicates that Westerners have lost 14 I.Q. points on average since the Victorian Era.

What exactly explains this decline? Study co-author Dr. Jan te Nijenhuis, professor of work and organizational psychology at the University of Amsterdam, points to the fact that women of high intelligence tend to have fewer children than do women of lower intelligence. This negative association between I.Q. and fertility has been demonstrated time and again in research over the last century.

But this isn't the first evidence of a possible decline in human intelligence.

"The reduction in human intelligence (if there is any reduction) would have begun at the time that genetic selection became more relaxed," Dr. Gerald Crabtree, professor of pathology and developmental biology at Stanford University, told The Huffington Post in an email. "I projected this occurred as our ancestors began to live in more supportive high density societies (cities) and had access to a steady supply of food. Both of these might have resulted from the invention of agriculture, which occurred about 5,000 to 12,000 years ago."

As for Dr. te Nijenhuis and colleagues, they analyzed the results of 14 intelligence studies conducted between 1884 to 2004, including one by Sir Francis Galton, an English anthropologist and a cousin of Charles Darwin. Each study gauged participants' so-called visual reaction times -- how long it took them to press a button in response to seeing a stimulus. Reaction time reflects a person's mental processing speed, and so is considered an indication of general intelligence.

Hipp chronoscope, a device used to measure short intervals of time with an accuracy of 1/1,000th of a second. Hipp chronoscopes were used to measure reaction time in experimental psychology labs in the late 19th Century.

In the late 19th Century, visual reaction times averaged around 194 milliseconds, the analysis showed. In 2004 that time had grown to 275 milliseconds. Even though the machine gauging reaction time in the late 19th Century was less sophisticated than that used in recent years, Dr. te Nijenhuis told The Huffington Post that the old data is directly comparable to modern data.

Other research has suggested an apparent rise in I.Q. scores since the 1940s, a phenomenon known as the Flynn Effect. But Dr. te Nijenhuis suggested the Flynn Effect reflects the influence of environmental factors -- such as better education, hygiene and nutrition -- and may mask the true decline in genetically inherited intelligence in the Western world.

This new research was published in the April 13 issue of Intelligence.


Dog Gets Grammar? Chaser The Border Collie Knows Nouns, Verbs & Prepositions, Study Shows (VIDEO)
The Huffington Post
By Jacqueline Howard
05/23/2013

Who said you can't teach an old dog new tricks?

Chaser, a 9-year-old border collie that gained fame for understanding more than 1,000 English words, now has shown that she can understand sentences. And not just two-word sentences, such as "fetch stick" or "paw ball" -- but sentences containing a prepositional object, verb, and direct object.

You go, girl.

"Chaser intuitively discovered how to comprehend sentences based on lots of background learning about different types of words," Dr. John Pilley, Chaser's owner and a retired psychology professor at Wofford College in South Carolina, told ScienceNews.

Dr. Pilley, the author of a new study about Chaser's abilities, previously taught her how to recognize objects by name, as well as verbs and prepositions in commands. He reinforced her understanding with praise and play.

Now one of Pilley's YouTube videos demonstrates how Chaser may understand these grammatical elements together in a sentence.

In the video (shown above), two of Chaser's toys are placed on opposite sides of a room (one toy is named "leopard," the other "ringneck"). When Chaser is told "to leopard, take ringneck," she follows the command by picking up "ringneck" and dropping it by "leopard."

Dr. Pilley wrote in his study's abstract that Chaser's understanding of such sentences was tested with multiple and familiar objects, as well as novel objects. She was even tested when she couldn't see the objects at the time she received a command. The study published online in the journal Learning and Motivation on May 13, 2013.

"Findings were statistically significant in all three scenarios," Dr. Pilley wrote. "Successful findings were attributed to Chaser's intensive training in her first three years of life."v Dr. Stanley Coren, a psychology professor at the University of British Columbia and an expert on canine intelligence, told The Huffington Post that similar studies showing dogs understanding simple two-word sentences -- such as "pull toy" or "fetch ball" -- have been repeated before.

Dr. Coren was not involved in Dr. Pilley's research.

So, just how smart are dogs?

"Roughly speaking, the average dog is equivalent to a human two-year-old in terms of mental abilities," Dr. Coren said. "And the 'super dogs' are equivalent to maybe a human two-and-a-half-year-old.”

"Super dogs" are breeds ranked in the top 20 percent of canine intelligence, Dr. Coren said. Border collies are considered the most intelligent, followed by poodles and German shepherds.

Poverty supresses children's genetic potential, study says

Many teachers say it's the parents' fault that their children are failing, and that teachers shouldn't be asked to do the parents' job. But what if parents simply can't do that job? Are teachers in the right when they wash their hands of their students' fates? I think not. Teachers should continue to do as much as they can for every child, and not say, as I heard one teacher say at Castle Park Elemetary, "I don't have time to help the kids who are behind." Too many teachers feel justified in placing invisible "rejected" stamps on the foreheads of kids who are "too much work."

Jan 10, 2011
Poverty supresses children's genetic potential, study says
Psychologists at University of Texas say the difference is about opportunity, not superior wealthy genes
By Adam Clark Estes

Researchers at the University of Texas claim that poverty may affect how children achieve their genetic potential. Using 750 sets of twins as subjects, the team of psychologists led by assistant professor Elliot Tucker-Drob found that 50 percent of the progress wealthier children show on mental ability tests can be attributed to genetics. Children from poor families, however, showed almost no progress attributable to genetics.

Don't get too carried away with the conclusions this might suggest. Based on this study, rich kids are not genetically superior to children of poverty. They're simply provided with more opportunities to fulfill their potential.

Of course, this conclusion holds some interesting implications for the field of childhood development. From the University of Texas announcement about the findings:

These findings go to the heart of the age-old debate about whether "nature" or "nurture" is more important to a child's development. They suggest the two work together and that the right environment can help children begin to reach their genetic potentials at a much earlier age than previously thought.

As the nation pulls out of the greatest economic disaster since the Great Depression, such a breakthrough could serve to shift attention toward taking better care of America's youth.

One out of every five children in the U.S. lives in poverty. That's a lot of lost potential...