| I suspect even thinking there's a "test" has it wrong. Yes, there's an experimental test -- as in, testing to see if salt is salt. But I dont think there's a formal test... as soon as you specify it, you've eliminated the need for intelligence. Intelligence is in that process of specification. In otherwords, we should be able to ask the machine "what do you think of woody allen's films?" and rather than just taking any answer.. we need an empirical test to see if the machine has actually understood the question. Not a formal test. There is no doubt a sequence of replies which will convince a person that the machine has understood the question: just record them, and play them back. We're not interested in the replies. We're interested in whether the machine is actually thinking about the world. Is it evaluating the films? What are its views? What if I show it a bad film and say it wasnt by woody allen? What then? There's something wrong in seeing this as a formal, rather than experimental, process. For any given machine we will need specific hypothesis tests as to its "intelligence", and we will need to treat it like any other empirical system. |
I want to get back to your initial statement about uncovering and structures, which I think is still grounded in the empirical realm. I think a less ambitious new test could be about the "uncovering" between analog data and the structures. To be real uncovering, the structures must be symbolic, not just transformed analog representation, and the symbolic structures must be useful, e.g. provide radical reduction of computational complexity compared to equivalent computation with analog data.
The point is to test if the machine can make the right abstraction (real uncovering) and also connect the abstraction with the data, not just games with words.