Turing Test: Mindless Game?

The Turing Test, originally configured for a human to distinguish between an unseen man and unseen woman through a text-based conversational measure of gender, is the ultimate test for thinking. So conceived Alan Turing when he replaced the woman with a machine. His assertion, that once a machine deceived a human judge into believing that they were the human, then that machine should be attributed with intelligence. But is the Turing Test nothing more than a mindless game? We present results from recent Loebner Prizes, a platform for the Turing Test, and find that machines in the contest appear conversationally worse rather than better, from 2004 to 2006, showing a downward trend in highest scores awarded to them by human judges. Thus the machines are not thinking in the same way as a human intelligent entity would.

Psychophysiological responses to appraisal dimensions in a computer game

A computer game was used to study psychophysiological reactions to emotion-relevant events. Two dimensions proposed by Scherer (1984a, 1984b) in his appraisal theory, the intrinsic pleasantness and goal conduciveness of game events, were studied in a factorial design. The relative level at which a player performed at the moment of an event was also taken into account. A total of 33 participants played the game while cardiac activity, skin conductance, skin temperature, and muscle activity as well as emotion self-reports were assessed. The self-reports indicate that game events altered levels of pride, joy, anger, and surprise. Goal conduciveness had little effect on muscle activity but was associated with significant autonomic effects, including changes to interbeat interval, pulse transit time, skin conductance, and finger temperature. The manipulation of intrinsic pleasantness had little impact on physiological responses. The results show the utility of attempting to manipulate emotion-constituent appraisals and measure their peripheral physiological signatures.

KQQKQQ and the Kasparov-World Game

The 1999 Kasparov-World game for the first time enabled anyone to join a team playing against a World Chess Champion via the web. It included a surprise in the opening, complex middle-game strategy and a deep ending. As the game headed for its mysterious finale, the World Team re-quested a KQQKQQ endgame table and was provided with two by the authors. This paper describes their work, compares the methods used, examines the issues raised and summarises the concepts involved for the benefit of future workers in the endgame field. It also notes the contribution of this endgame to chess itself.

Non-commutative symbolic coding

We give a non-commutative generalization of classical symbolic coding in the presence of a synchronizing word. This is done by a scattering theoretical approach. Classically, the existence of a synchronizing word turns out to be equivalent to asymptotic completeness of the corresponding Markov process. A criterion for asymptotic completeness in general is provided by the regularity of an associated extended transition operator. Commutative and non-commutative examples are analysed.

The symbolic value of grafting in ancient Rome

Some scholars have read Virgil’s grafted tree (G. 2.78–82) as a sinister image, symptomatic of man’s perversion of nature. However, when it is placed within the long tradition of Roman accounts of grafting (in both prose and verse), it seems to reinforce a consistently positive view of the technique, its results, and its possibilities. Virgil’s treatment does represent a significant change from Republican to Imperial literature, whereby grafting went from mundane reality to utopian fantasy. This is reflected in responses to Virgil from Ovid, Columella, Calpurnius, Pliny the Elder, and Palladius (with Republican context from Cato, Varro, and Lucretius), and even in the postclassical transformation of Virgil’s biography into a magical folktale.

Using bargaining-game theory for negotiating concession period for BOT-type contract

This paper extends the build-operate-transfer (BOT) concession model (BOTCcM) to a new method for identifying a concession period by using bargaining-game theory. Concession period is one of the most important decision variables in arranging a BOT-type contract, and there are few methodologies available for helping to determine the value of this variable. The BOTCcM presents an alternative method by which a group of concession period solutions are produced. Nevertheless, a typical weakness in using BOTCcM is that the model cannot recommend a specific time span for concessionary. This paper introduces a new method called BOT bargaining concession model (BOTBaC) to enable the identification of a specific concession period, which takes into account the bargaining behavior of the two parties concerned in engaging a BOT contract, namely, the investor and the government concerned. The application of BOTBaC is demonstrated through using an example case.

Enhancing dominant modes in nonstationary time series by means of the symbolic resonance analysis

We present the symbolic resonance analysis (SRA) as a viable method for addressing the problem of enhancing a weakly dominant mode in a mixture of impulse responses obtained from a nonlinear dynamical system. We demonstrate this using results from a numerical simulation with Duffing oscillators in different domains of their parameter space, and by analyzing event-related brain potentials (ERPs) from a language processing experiment in German as a representative application. In this paradigm, the averaged ERPs exhibit an N400 followed by a sentence final negativity. Contemporary sentence processing models predict a late positivity (P600) as well. We show that the SRA is able to unveil the P600 evoked by the critical stimuli as a weakly dominant mode from the covering sentence final negativity. (c) 2007 American Institute of Physics. (c) 2007 American Institute of Physics.