Artificial Intelligence: A Guide to Intelligent Systems

                This book covers Artificial Intelligence in a very simple way for everyone to understand. In the beginning of this book it talks about intelligent machines and what they can/can’t do. One of the things I found of most interest to me was the ‘Turing Test’. This test was conducted to see if it was possible to spot the differences between man and machine in an unbiased setting using only questions. The machine itself was set up to think and act like a human in order to catch out the person asking the questions and convince them otherwise; with the human also trying to convince that they weren’t the machine. It then goes on to talk about how machines that act exactly like humans are almost beside the point, as a machine is supposed to aid us with our weaknesses.

                                     The ‘Turing Test’ then reminded me of ‘Clever Bot’; an AI system that I remembered from being a child. Although I am already aware that it is a computerised system, I wanted to see if maybe it could compose a solid enough argument to convince me that it might be human. I started off simple:

                      Not very convinced at this point but, assuming I was unaware it’s a machine, I would have no reason to believe it was lying either.

To which it replied: ‘Ugh you’re not romantic at all’. I did find it interesting how it has these human qualities with saying things like ‘ugh’; something you wouldn’t really expect from AI. However, although it can string a sentence together in proper English, it can’t really have a conversation.

 Although I haven’t really determined anything from this little experiment, it was fun to revisit my childhood a bit!