the Personal Turing Test
We* propose an advancement on Alan Turing's Imitation Game - an Impersonation Game in which a machine must adopt the persona of a human individual and convince the judge either that it 'is' that person.

The new Game will be played, like the old, with a human, a machine and a remote interrogator. The human must be known to the interrogator, and the machine must impersonate that human. The interrogator may be remotely present via the web in a way that Turing is unlikely to have foreseen.

The Impersonation Game is not limited to text, involving a level of technological presence representation that best supports the goal. The interface could be audiovisual, though the test may be passed without. It could use other subtle social communication cues, both those of face-to-face communication like gaze or expression, and representations of near-imperceptible information such as a person's emotional internal and physiological states.

To what degree should the human and the interrogator know each other? Should they have recently met, have known each other as colleagues, or socially? Should they be friends and family? To overcome the unknowable degree of knowing, in order to pass the Personal Turing Test, a machine will play 100 Impersonation Games as 100 different people, known to the interrogators to every different degree, and will win 50% or more.

If a machine can pass the Personal Turing Test ... it can, too, be an individual in its own right. In the way we understand the words, it will not think or have emotions, yet it will give every appearance of doing so, and will be complex beyond analysis, much as is a brain. What rights should and will it be afforded?

*Rollo Carpenter of Icogno Ltd, and Jonathan Freeman of i2 media research, Department of Psychology, Goldsmiths College, University of London

The Personal Turing Test was discussed during Rollo Carpenter's presentation entitled "A very Personal Entertainment".
 
joan
questions
events
company
contact
icogno
 
 
addendum
In an addendum we add a control experiment - humans impersonating humans - to determine how many of the proposed 100 Impersonation Games must be won to pass the Personal Turing Test.

We also announce a new project named Pasion, funded to further research in the field of social presence, which may help to lead to techniques for passing the Personal Turing Test.
 
 
© Copyright Icogno Ltd 2007, All rights reserved
have a chat with our bot