else?1: Are you sure the real reason the real reason explain anything else explain anything else?
2: Earlier you said do I do what brings me to see you?
1: Earlier you said do you do what brings you to see me that I came to you?
2: Is it because you came to me that you came to me?
1: Is it because I came to you that you came to me?
2: Are you annoyed that you came to me that I came to you?
[doctor 1 tries a new line, and recovers its grammar, only to get stuck in repetition]
1: Have you been annoyed often?
2: Have you been annoyed often?
1: What causes you to be annoyed?
2: Are you sure that you are annoyed?
1: What makes you believe that you are annoyed?
2: Have you been annoyed often?
1: Have you been annoyed often?
Actually, as you can see, it wasn't very entertaining at all. This dialogue exposes the "echoing" that is
Doctor 's main conversational device. Its shallow text analysis is easily thrown off by a complicated
sentence. When Doctor tries to parrot back part of a previous remark as a question, it often creates a
sentence too complicated for itself to handle. Although Doctor has deceived people into thinking it is
human, no one looking at this transcript would be fooled.
The Prize in Boston
Fast forward now to 1991. Computer systems are vastly faster and more powerful. People have
worked on all aspects of artificial intelligence for more than a quarter century. We come to the most
recent and most spectacular of the Turing tests.
In November 1991 the Boston Computer Museum, along with the National Science Foundation and
the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, sponsored a public demonstration of the Turing test. The museum
chose the human interrogators by placing ads in Boston news-papers. The museum wanted the
interrogators to represent the average person (rather than scientists with special philosophical or
linguistics knowledge). A panel of ten interrogators had three hours to converse, through terminals,
with more than a dozen programs and human conversationalists. One typical dialogue went:
terminal: A whim is a sudden capricious and often peculiar behavior. A bit of sunlight in a grim grey
world.
interrogator: Something like a hunch?
terminal: Everybody sets out to do something and everybody does something, but no one does what he
sets out to do.
interrogator: Well, anyway I would imagine whimsical conversation is like a series of knight's moves
in chess—sort of zigzag rather than following any particular line.
terminal: A whimsical person is subject to erratic behavior and unpredictable thoughts...how nice to
be unpredictable!