
TagGeorge D. Montanez


Is the Turing Test Misguided? George Montañez comments
When you think about it, the Turing test is a bit of a scam. Human beings are supposed to guess whether we are talking to computers purely according to answers. But clever answers can be precoded by a clever person. We could be talking to a well-trained magpie. George Montañez of Harvey Mudd College argues that the question of whether machines can think, as posed in Alan Turing’s seminal paper in 1950 , “Computing machines and intelligence,” is too vague to admit of an exact answer. Besides which, it is kind of complicated. https://episodes.castos.com/mindmatters/Mind-Matters-088-George-Montanez.mp3 Transcript. As he told Walter Bradley Center director Robert J. Marks in a recent podcast: George Montañez Yeah. So, there was actually three versions of the…

Is Ray Kurzweil’s Singularity Now Nearer — or Impossible?
In response to Kurzweil’s talk at the COSM Technology Summit, panelists noted that AI achievements are revolutionary in size but limited by their nature in scopeGeorge Montañez, Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Harvey Mudd College, took issue with Kurzweil’s claim that AlphaGoZero needed no instructions to beat humans at the game of Go: “For a system like this to work, a human must define the incentive structure, also encoding the assumptions.” The sheer power of a computing system does not cause it to do anything at all.
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How You Can Really Know You’re Talking to a Computer
In a lively exchange, computer science experts offer some savvy adviceClaims that a given program has “passed the Turing test” should be treated skeptically because a program can be optimized to pass the Turing test without demonstrating any particular intelligence.
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