Re: Re: Empirical data surrounding guards and firewalls.

[Valdis.Kletnieks () vt edu]

On Fri, 10 Sep 2004 09:10:19 +0200, Vincent Archer said:

> Emulating a human is very very different from making a sentience. That's
> the main flaw of the Turing's test: it attempts to prove the existence
> of human-type sentience, not sentience in general.

Douglas Adams understood this one - "So long, and thanks for all the fish..."

We usually restrict ourselves to human-type sentience because we have a very
low number of examples of alternatives (outside of the occasional science
fiction writing that posits the existence of a hive mind or a sentient,
thinking boulder - note that such are invariably a human's thoughts on what
said thing *might* be like, and as such may not reflect a real hive mind or
boulder).

The basic concept of the Turing Test works for alternate sentiences as well -
there's no real reason why it couldn't be (for instance) a human trying to tell
the difference between a hive mind and a computer pretending to be a hive mind,
or a hive mind trying to distinguish between a hive mind and a computer.  The
difference in the two is only in that a hive mind is more likely to be able to
think of "trick questions" than a human is, so a computer pretending to be a
hive mind is more likely to fool a human than another hive mind.

But we already know this innately - you can pretend to be a Hasidic Jew, and
probably fool somebody in Montana who's never seen or heard of a Hasidic Jew
before. But trying to pull the the same stunt on the front steps of a synagogue
in Israel....

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