Question: What is your favourite experiment?

Huma Shah answered on 10 Nov 2016:

Hello Jess,

For me it is the Turing test but that can be implemented in two different ways. The most difficult way for a human judge is the ‘simultaneous comparison’ version of the Turing test.

Imagine the chat interface you use here in ‘I’m a Scientist…’ imagine you are talking to two different entities at the same time, one is human and one is a machine, you have to ask questions to determine which is the actual human and which is the machine. This is the simultaneous comparison. It is fun to implement, because you have to restrict the question-answers to time, I choose 5 minutes because that’s the duration Turing wrote in his famous 1950 paper ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence’.

From experiments you hear sighs when the 5-minute cut off occurs and the Turing test chat interface shuts down, just as in the case of the 30-minute cut-off here in ‘I’m a scientist’. Turing test participants – the human ones, really enjoy taking part and the judges find it fun trying to say if they were talking with a human or a machine. It’s fun to experience as the experiment designer and organiser.

Huma