Could Twitter be the venue for a real world Turing Test?

Alan Turing is in the news at the moment, but the thing I've been thinking about is the test named after him. The Turing Test is a way of assessing machine intelligence, with the mark of true machine intelligence being when it is indistinguishable from a human.

Two things about machine intelligence. I recently phoned up my credit card company and had a complete conversation with a very effective voice recognition system that said goodbye at the end of the phone call when all the things I wanted to sort out had been sorted. I actually said goodbye back before I realised what I was doing. The other thing was a game where you press the next word suggested by your phone's autocomplete function until you end up in a repeating loop (which you will). Several people (presumed humans) on an online message board posted their autocomplete paragraphs, all of which made some sort of sense up to a point. It read like people's attempts to communicate in another language, where the words kind of made sense but didn't really.

Spambots have been part of the Internet it feels like forever. Some of the spam comments that get posted on my other website are almost convincing. They steal text and manipulate it in mimicry of actual comments. Bots are also the bane of Twitter, fake followers, odd retweeters of old tweets, little unintelligent ghosts masquerading as real people. Recently, a guy I follow boasted that he set up a new Twitter account as an experiment and attracted 10,000 followers in a weekend - almost all of them bots. He then said that despite the bot problem, Twitter was still an excellent place for a "natter".

That got me thinking, we natter on Twitter to people we know, and to some people we only know through Twitter, and we know the difference between a real person tweeting and a bot. We can spot it and differentiate. But for how long?

The problem with Turing Tests is that if you knew you were being tested that would make you suspicious of the conversation you were having. You would look for clues that it wasn't a human on the other end of the conversation. But what if you weren't primed like that?

Twitter actually could be a real world Turing Test testing-ground. Set up an intelligent machine to interact with people and see if people did actually interact with it, thinking it was human. How long would it be before people worked out it wasn't?

There is a whole lot of information in the Wikipedia article about the Turing Test, including the question of whether people should be told whether they are possibly talking to a computer. But if you don't want people to know, I think Twitter will be the place to run it.

Contender for best spam ever

I get a lot of spam comments on freelance theology. This one entertained me immensely:

This is NOT SPAM, all I am asking you to do is read this…PLEASE and pass it along. This is a TRUE UPDATE on the Gulf Coast BP Oil Spill!!

Have you ever heard of Whipple Van Ness Jones, III?
Probably not, unless you watch the CBS daytime soap opera The Bold and the Beautiful.

You see, according to Wikipedia….
Whipple Jones III is a fictional character on CBS’s daytime drama The Bold and the Beautiful. He had been portrayed by Rick Hearst from February 13, 2002 to August 29, 2002 and was absent for nearly seven years before returning to the show on July 17, 2009….
However, what they don’t tell you is that Whipple Van Ness Jones, III is a real person.
Whip resides in NW Florida with his wife, 3 children, and pets.
The problem is that when the BP oil spill happened Whip and his family lost their family business in Seaside, Florida the name of the store was Molly Caroline’s named after his two daughters Georgia Caroline and Molly Catherine (Whipple Van Ness Jones, IV wasn’t born yet when they opened their store).
Whip loved the idea that The Bold and the Beautiful named a character after him, he thought it was fun because obviously how else would they come up with the EXACT SAME NAME for the show.
Whip contacted the show early on (sent a copy of his birth certificate and drivers license), they didn’t offer any money (and Whip didn’t ask for any), just an autograph from the star portraying him.

The problem is NOT that Whip has a character on a show, the problem is Whip and his family lost their main source of income due to the BP oil spill.

Now when Whip applies for a job, and the employment places run a reference check on him and find a Wikipedia article calling Whip a fictional character on CBS’s daytime drama The Bold and the Beautiful, they claim he is using the name of a soap opera character…

What Whip did was start his own dot com….and is allowing people to post blogs on his site for free, just to show that he is a real person.
Google does give Whip a TINY amount to have ads on the right hand side of his webpage.
Please pass this along to your friends to show that Whipple Van Ness Jones, III is not only a real person, but a man trying to keep food on his family’s table.

Thank you!!
PS- Whip and his family did put in a claim with BP, they just haven’t heard anything yet. AS OF MARCH 24, 2011

PPS- Also, some people consider CBS to have BORDERLINE stolen Whip’s identity. Whip doesn’t see it this way, but how would you feel if you couldn’t get a job based on what Wikipedia says about you????

I don't even know what they want me to do about it.

Another post about spam marketing and stupid names

Another trawl through the bulk mail folder has revealed yet more names that have been especially selected to dupe unwitting idiots to open a spam email. I've done this twice now and it’s still entertaining.

How stupid would you have to be to open an unsolicited email from…
Bella Kimball
etti miguela
Ronda Dodd
Ottilia Hilliard
ramona cyril
shoshana flores
Nelly Mcbride
zozo momoh
Shavonda
Estella Mcnally
Jasper Buck
Zander Gonzales
Luciano Sprague
Lovetta Lavera

and what is the point of sending spam with one word ‘names’ like…
cowgirl
clang (!?)
cholera (!?!?!)

My favourite from this haul was jennifer bran, who sent me an email titled Sweeter Tasting Sperm. Mmm, yummy. What is the recipe?

Stupid spam names

Inspired by Tez, the Tokyo-based hurrah maiden, and her comments on stupid spammers, I had a look through my yahoo bulk mail folders (yes, I’m that lucky – I have two). I have to agree with TLB that the people who set up spam are obviously idiots, and all the evidence can be found in the names they use (culled and presented below for your amusement) to try and convince you that they’re genuine. Losers!

Hmm, yes, I’d open an email from someone called…
Hung Mahoney
Octavius Herbert
Aurora Law
Geralyn [that’s not even a name!]
Gertrud Nanette
Henriette Frost
Claudius Le [Roman mum, Chinese dad?]
Jonah Rodriguez
Clementina Pratt
Aurelia Wylie
Adalbert Jensen
Benedikta Dantzler
Jolene Jeffers
Yesenia Cullen
Kresten League
Edna Gore
Barra Spikes
Montagu Fuller
Swapnil Moffatt
Bozidar Downey
Prem Scoggin
Cronus Mosier
Gunhilda Danko

But this stupidity has given me a certain amount of inspiration – now when I’m looking for potential characters for a story, I’ll just refer back to this post. I’m already imagining glamorous lesbian private detective/part-time lapdancer Benedikta Dantzler investigating the evil crime syndicate run by Septuagenarian mob-boss Edna Gore, whose deadly assassins Hung Mahoney and Gunhilda Danko killed innocent bank-clerk Adalbert Jansen, when he inadvertently discovered the mob’s money-laundering plan. Can Dantzler foil the bad guys, console Adalbert Jansen’s grieving grown-up daughters Clementina Pratt and Aurelia Wylie, avoid the amorous advances of Jansen’s estranged thrice-married bi-curious wife Yesenia Cullen, and find out more about the alluring and enigmatic Aurora Law – a fatally beautiful femme with her own score to settle with Gore. And who are Cronus Mosier, Swapnil Moffatt and Barra Spikes, and why are they sitting on Benedikta’s couch drinking espresso at 7am?