How my program didn't pass the Turing Test

by DoC (*cough*).

When I was an undergraduate I hooked up an MGonz program to the net, with interesting results. Now I've finally got around to setting up a page to tell everyone about it ..

MGonz lives again on the net!

Tom Doris, a postgrad student here at DCU, has resurrected our favourite friend and you can now talk to him at http://www.compapp.dcu.ie/~tdoris/mgonz.html. This is pretty much the original MGonz in LISP.

And one of my lecturers, Dr. Mark Humphrys, wrote the original MGonz, in LISP :) http://www.compapp.dcu.ie/~humphrys/eliza.html. This has a slightly different personality, but is still recognisably the disputed illegitimate son of MGonz!

This goes back to an MGonz program I wrote in 2nd year of my undergraduate degree at Dublin City University in early 1999. I hooked it up to my net account (on the page DISPUTEDILLEGITIMATESONOFMGONZ on RedBrick), so that when I was logged off (or to be precise, disconnected, from a Solaris system), it would process all talk messages sent to me. There were numerous hilarious incidents, but these are the best ones.

So, it's late evening in Ireland. I've logged out and gone off to get food or something, leaving MGONZ (or The Disputed Illegitimate Son Of MGonz as I called it) to mind the fort. So someone on the net decides to call me up for a chat. They stays talking for a few minutes, unaware that no one is at home. During this time, my machine's brutal cross-examination forces a remarkable admission:


BTW, is there any medical reason for your sexual impotence?
195.92.194.19 : none that is known to science
I see.
195.92.194.19 : i am blind and deaf
I've never been blind and deaf , what's it like?
195.92.194.19 : dark and quiet
Ahh, I see.
195.92.194.19 : I dont

The next day, I logged in, and was amazed to find out what my machine had been up to in my absence. Here is the Daily Logfile Directory . A couple of notes:

You are warned that there is a lot of bad language and crude humour here
Because of net delays, the stimulus and the response do not always appear side by side.
Note that it is impossible for the human to have the last word.
I only began logging The Disputed Illegitimate Son of Mgonz's Responses and IP addresses after 10th March 1999, before that, the logs are a bit uninspiring.

So what's the secret of an effective Turing Test-passer? Jason L. Hutchens, who produced this excellent program, has written a document, How to Pass the Turing Test by Cheating. See his Markov chain approach, where he got the program to learn (in multiple languages!) by talking to net users. I think the success of MGonz and the Disputed Illegitimate Son of MGonz is mainly due to its obscenity and relentless aggression. Cleaning it up severely weakens the conversation.

We can also translate the conversation into valleyspeak (hilarious). Of course this is all nothing to do with AI, as I will elaborate below.

Links

Turing Test:
- The Turing Test was introduced in:
  - Turing, Alan M. (see also here) (1950), Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Mind 59:433-60.
- The Alan Turing Home Page by his biographer Andrew Hodges (also here and here, author of Alan Turing: the Enigma, 1983). He says about this page: `his programme induced a dialogue more human than any other I've seen'
- The Loebner Prize Competition (and here and a Wired article)
- Harnad, Stevan (1992), The Turing Test Is Not A Trick
- Cowley, Stephen J. and MacDorman, Karl (1995), Simulating Conversations: The Communion Game
`Eliza' type programs:
- The original Eliza program was by:
  - Weizenbaum, Joseph (see also here) (1966), ELIZA - A computer program for the study of natural language communication between man and machine, Communications of the ACM 9:36-45.
- Despite its foul language, MGonz is now linked to by various teaching courses:
  - Computers and Society, University of North Carolina, USA
  - Teaching Clinical Psychology, Rider University, NJ, USA
  - Artificial Intelligence, Central Washington University, USA
  - Artificial Intelligence, National Technical University, Athens, Greece
- Minds and Machines by Ned Block
- the book Common Lisp the Language
AI and ALife programs on the web:

FAQ - Who is The Disputed Illegitimate Son Of MGonz?

So where does this name come from, people have asked. Well, i discovered MGonz after Dr. Mark Humphrys came to DCU in summer 1998, bringing an extensive webpage with him. One of the most interesting parts was this MGonz business, so, I decided to try my hand at doing something similar, using a shell script, and lots and lots of files full of bold words. This thing actually worked, and in my spare time (i.e. between bed and bed), my program, imaginitively dubbed "Talker", acquired a larger size, a personality and life. Or perhaps just a larger size. However, it was not MGonz. It was very very slow, taking 30 seconds or more to respond. Eventually, I gave up and rewrote it in C, my language of choice. I put it on the web, and began logging it, and the rest, they say, is history. The program was then renamed, "The Disputed Illegitimate Son/Daughter Of MGonz, presented to you good people by the loyal Obsidian Order of MGonz". Someone pointed out to me that no self-respecting lady would come out with such foulness, and someone else just said it was just too darn long, so it is now, and will remain "The Disputed Illegitimate Son of MGonz".

This page is really an exercise in blatant copyright infringement. The proper version of this page can be found here. It was done by Mark Humphrys. I finally put up this web page in early 1999.