Still Waters Posted September 9, 2011 #1 Share Posted September 9, 2011 The world's first conversation between two robots quickly descended in to an argument about God. Two graduate PhD students at Cornell University gave voices and 2D avatars to a pair of online "chatbots", which they named Alan and Sruthi. A chatbot is a computer programme designed to hold a spoken or written coversation with a human. The students Jason Yosinski and Igor Labutov said that they wanted to see what happened when two chatbots talked to each other. So they created Alan, a British man, and Sruthi, a south Asian woman. Sruthi soon turns the conversation to God. Asked if he believes in God, Alan answers: "It's not everything," to which its counterpart says: "Not everything could also be something, for example not everything could be half of something, which is still something and therefore not nothing." It is believed that the avatars ended up talking about God because when they interract with humans a question they are often asked is: "Do you believe in God." The avatars have had about 65 million conversations with humans. Read more... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Space Commander Travis Posted September 9, 2011 #2 Share Posted September 9, 2011 'Sruthi soon turns the conversation to God. Asked if he believes in God, Alan answers: "It's not everything," to which its counterpart says: "Not everything could also be something, for example not everything could be half of something, which is still something and therefore not nothing." ' So when two robots get together the conversation will term to gnomic philoshphical incomprehensibility, then. I don't think we need worry about the machines taking over quite yet. Or have they been programmed by Donald Rumsfeld? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
joshy Posted September 10, 2011 #3 Share Posted September 10, 2011 (edited) this was already news on this site like a week ago, unless I'm mistaken. Edit: well i cant find where i saw this before on this site so that must mean i saw it on stumbleupon or something to that effect. Edited September 10, 2011 by joshy Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
voidla Posted September 10, 2011 #4 Share Posted September 10, 2011 joshy is correct, this has already been posted! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
marshall2442 Posted September 10, 2011 #5 Share Posted September 10, 2011 There is no God. To have a God you need a God to create that God. So we don't exsist and we never will. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ohio state buckeyes Posted September 10, 2011 #6 Share Posted September 10, 2011 How are those robots ? Look like computers to me. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
KainFall Posted September 10, 2011 #7 Share Posted September 10, 2011 Brilliant Output, I can most certainly agree with these robots statement(s). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dr. Zodiac Posted September 10, 2011 #8 Share Posted September 10, 2011 Marshall, it's too complex of a debate, I seem to imagine the world like a sims universe. Obviously someone created the sims that's their god. But who created the creator no one knows. Just because we can't answer that doesn't mean the creator of the sims is any less real. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kludge808 Posted September 10, 2011 #9 Share Posted September 10, 2011 There is no God. To have a God you need a God to create that God. So we don't exsist and we never will. The frightening part of this is that it makes sense. I think it's time for my meds. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kludge808 Posted September 10, 2011 #10 Share Posted September 10, 2011 Marshall, it's too complex of a debate, I seem to imagine the world like a sims universe. Obviously someone created the sims that's their god. But who created the creator no one knows. Just because we can't answer that doesn't mean the creator of the sims is any less real. Oh, boy. This brings back a discussion I had some years ago about the universe not being everything in totality but rather that which was caused by our own local "big bang" or whatever including creation by the Great Jujube or the Flying Spaghetti Monster. This suggests that the universe is finite. A parallel assumption is that space is infinite and has infinite dimensions. This allows for infinite universes all of which could be created by different gods much like different people create their own worlds/fantasies using the Sims, Second Reality or virtual reality. (I used offline RPGs as my example since that's what we had at the time. I'm really ancient. ) In this case, each of the chatbots has a different creator hence a different god which, if allowed to expand to numerous chatbots, could lead to an interesting situation. That could be fun! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
eight bits Posted September 10, 2011 #11 Share Posted September 10, 2011 (edited) Once upon a time, in the days of our youngest members' grandparents, some people at MIT made a program which, in its various incarnations, came to be known as LISA or DOCTOR (all-upper case didn't mean shouting in those days, mostly because dual case text cost extra). LISA was designed to hold a rudimentary conversation with human beings, imitating a minimalist form of psychotherapy which was then popular. I suppose that makes LISA a chatbot, but she wasn't very chatty, since that kind of therapist wasn't very chatty, either. LISA said things like "Tell me more about your mother" a lot. Anyway, LISA was very popular. Students would spend hours with her, on teletype-based terminals, some operating at a blistering 300 bits per second, telling LISA more about their mothers. Making LISA available on MIT's academic network is sometimes called the first fully scientific experiment in AI, since LISA's popularity, and especially the students' willingness to believe that they were chatiing with somebody, even when they knew it was a LISP program, was an empirical test of the assumptions underlying the Turing Test, and a strong challenge to those assumptions. And lo, it came to pass, back in those dark ages, that somebody else did in short order write a patient program, mimicing what a certain kind of mentally ill person says, especially when asked about his or her mother once too often. MIT being the place it is, the two chatbots were connected up to each other. And so it was that, before the parents of the students-in-the-OP were out of diapers, two chatbots had talked to each other. What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. ~ Ecclesiastes 1:9 Edited September 10, 2011 by eight bits Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AmpleFyre Posted September 10, 2011 #12 Share Posted September 10, 2011 So is it just me or are these 'chatbots' actually thinking for themselves, albeit at a fairly basic level? And did anyone else notice that when one asked "Would you like a body?" and the other replied "Sure."? It's quite... interesting, if you think of these 'robots' as living things... I wonder if they realize they are trapped inside the metallic shell of a computer, and the world beyond is much more vast than what they can comprehend...? Hmm... Sounds very similar to the human condition... As I think about it... Perhaps we're more akin to our supposed God-Creator figure than I had previously thought... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
eight bits Posted September 10, 2011 #13 Share Posted September 10, 2011 The vitues of taking a walk between posts. ELIZA was the original name of the program. Presumably, after E. Doolittle, My Fair Lady, not the UK singer. But Lisa was nice, too... different thread . Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Timothy Posted September 11, 2011 #14 Share Posted September 11, 2011 I can only imagine that this would be a very limited interaction, and that it would always result in the same argument. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
libstaK Posted September 11, 2011 #15 Share Posted September 11, 2011 So they end up talking about God huh? The skeptics v believers section of the forum makes more sense now - *they're already multiplying out there and are here* Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
reggie2011 Posted September 11, 2011 #16 Share Posted September 11, 2011 thats one of the stragest things ive ever seen,they didnt get off on the right foot lmao they almost seemed to be ai and had feelings weird very weird and disturbing... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kleng Posted September 11, 2011 #17 Share Posted September 11, 2011 That kid is brilliant just for making them converse with one another. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ChrLzs Posted September 11, 2011 #18 Share Posted September 11, 2011 Once upon a time, in the days of our youngest members' grandparents, some people at MIT made a program which, in its various incarnations, came to be known as LISA or DOCTOR (all-upper case didn't mean shouting in those days, mostly because dual case text cost extra). LISA was designed to hold a rudimentary conversation with human beings, imitating a minimalist form of psychotherapy which was then popular. ...MIT being the place it is, the two chatbots were connected up to each other... Indeed, this is by no means a first. I did it meself back in about 1995 - I had written my own 'improved' version of 'Eliza' (in compiled Turbo Basic no less - them were the days!), and then tried this experiment myself testing my program against the original Eliza. OK, so I had to retype the responses, but it's the same principle... And yes, it fairly quickly degenerated into a looping conversation with philosophical overtones with the odd somewhat random change of topic thrown in. Exactly as the software was programmed.. I can still remember the routines: Why does that topic interest you so much? Does ... always have that effect on you? Are you always that negative? Hmm. But let's talk about ... Do you think it is normal to be ... and so on. Sophisticated stuff! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cryptozological Mascot Posted September 12, 2011 #19 Share Posted September 12, 2011 Shhhh... All of the Senior Moderators on here are actually chatbots! I'm sorry my electronic overlords! I didn't mean to spill the beans!!! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mantis914 Posted September 12, 2011 #20 Share Posted September 12, 2011 Haha, LISA, is she built like Kelly LeBrock? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Seany Posted September 13, 2011 #21 Share Posted September 13, 2011 Hello,I love those bots because they are entertaining. Just to say this article is misleading and may lead people to believe that bots do think!. They can only compute. I am a programmer myself and can say true AI is possible but has not yet been established in the public domain (due to computing power constraints). Bots trigger answers from a database of words/phrase (populated by past human chat) based on decision trees, key words presented to them. They have no emotions, no mood, no feelings … to be honest they cannot get bored or care about things. These bots would respond exactly the same way (x million times) given the input, logic behind collecting input, logic behind responding to input and database all left untouched. A human being would truly get bored doing the same thing over and over again. The topic of God did not come out of the blue… this topic was once introduced by someone chatting to them and hence got triggered by key words or some complex randomisation formula (yes that is computing login not creative thinking or imagination). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jbefumo Posted September 13, 2011 #22 Share Posted September 13, 2011 Two non-entities discussing a third - fascinating . . . at least robots, I suspect, will be a bit less capricious than the bronze-age icon of brain-dead judeo-christians... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BiffSplitkins Posted September 13, 2011 #23 Share Posted September 13, 2011 I'd be interested to hear the conversation between these two.... WOPR HAL Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LimeGelatin Posted September 13, 2011 #24 Share Posted September 13, 2011 So they proved that male robots are liars, and that female robots are snoody, idealistic, and condescending. Well thats just awesome. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
thalassinus Posted January 9, 2012 #25 Share Posted January 9, 2012 have you tried chatting to a bot. its so hard. they accuse you all the time and never answer a question. its terrible. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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