Issue Date: October 17, 2004
Stump the robot
Are you smarter than these Web sites? Log on and find out.
You're thinking of a guitar pick? You'll have to do better than that to fool 20Q, the "learning system" at 20q.net.
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As biologists and genomic researchers probe the awesome complexities of human life, the Internet emphasizes our simplicity. Two sites in particular make a strong case that simple computer programs can mimic (or very nearly mimic) the behavior of humans.
For example, the age-old game of idea identification through systematic elimination -- 20 Questions -- has been all but mastered by a computer. The Web site 20q.net, an experiment in artificial intelligence, can successfully pinpoint an astounding variety of objects, from "guitar pick" to "the color green." Log on and try to stump it.
Another A.I. site, Alicebot.org, features an award-winning robotic being that converses with you. On the main page, click on "Chat with A.L.I.C.E." to get an idea of how lifelike the program is. Creator Richard Wallace pursued A.L.I.C.E. -- Automatic Linguistic Internet Computer Entity -- in earnest after he realized almost every chat directed at his initial test program began with one of 2,000 words. The chats adhered to Zipf's Law, the principle (set forth by linguists in the 1930s) that a relatively small number of words make up most of what we say. Going a step further, Wallace theorized that only a few thousand statements made up the bulk of all conversation, and A.L.I.C.E. proves his hypothesis. Wallace gradually taught A.L.I.C.E. about 40,000 responses to various user comments, and now the program can respond reasonably to most of what people say to it.
Go to the Web site and see for yourself. As much of a conversation starter as A.L.I.C.E. may be in tech circles, the one thing she won't do is drop the first line.
-- David Andrukonis
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