This document provides instructions for an assignment to visit various sites related to machine intelligence and artificial intelligence. The document outlines specific requirements for the assignment, including making connections to human intelligence, providing details and examples from interactions with the sites, and deriving one's own views rather than just describing interactions. The document then provides details on specific sites and programs to interact with, including the early natural language processing program ELIZA, various chatbots based on the Turing Test, and CAPTCHAs. Students are instructed to provide comments and summaries of their interactions with each site in parts A, B, and C of the assignment.

1. Intelligent Lab
Name________________________________________________
_______________
This is a pretty open ended assignment. Your job is to visit
some sites having to do with machine intelligence and then
write a commentary about the experience. Remember:
· Good students make connections. Our topic is intelligence --
something that in human beings is highly variable. Be sure that
your comments connect to that.
· Good students give details and specific evidence. Try to
capture what you are doing while you are doing it. With some
of these sites this is not easy, but if you don’t have examples
your grade will suffer.
· Good students have ideas. That is, their comments do not
merely describe interactions, they derive their own views from
them.
To prepare for this assignment you may want to review the
section of Chapter 11 of the text “ Overview of Artificial
Intelligence” which begins on page 507.
IMPOTANT: You need to give these machines something to
work with. Try for full sentences and avoid one word inputs.
ALSO IMPORTANT: Some of these are on rather slow systems
-- if you are not getting responses, try a different one and come
back later.
Part A: Eliza
“ELIZA is a computer program and an early example of
primitive natural language processing. ELIZA operated by

2. processing users' responses to scripts, the most famous of which
was DOCTOR, a simulation of a Rogerian psychotherapist.
Using almost no information about human thought or emotion,
DOCTOR sometimes provided a startlingly human-like
interaction. ELIZA was written at MIT by Joseph Weizenbaum
between 1964 and 1966.” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA)
This program actually pre-dates most studies of artificial
intelligence. We remember it because at the time it was written
it attracted a great deal of attention and accelerated research on
AI. Most interesting was the discovery that some users believed
that this program actually provided psychotherapy. This was
never the creator’s intent and it is hard to tell whether people
felt that the machine was intelligent (thus passing the Turing
test below or if there are just a bunch of gullible people out
there.
Remember that this is supposed to mimic a therapist who gets
people to talk about emotional issues. The idea is that the
patient does most of the talking and the therapist simply directs
the conversation. Conversations should be about feelings since
that is what the program is designed to recognize.
http://www-ai.ijs.si/eliza/eliza.html
(Note: your conversation disappears as you type new lines --
copy and paste to preserve it)
A1 Specific comments about your interaction with this Eliza

3. http://www.cyberpsych.org/eliza/
(Not bad. Again, text that scrolls out of the box is lost)
A2 Specific comments about your interaction with this Eliza
A3 A general overview of your experience with these programs
Part B: Turing Machines
“The Turing test is a test of a machine's ability to exhibit
intelligent behavior equivalent to, or indistinguishable from,
that of a human. Alan Turing proposed that a human evaluator
would judge natural language conversations between a human
and a machine that is designed to generate human-like
responses. The evaluator would be aware that one of the two
partners in conversation is a machine, and all participants would
be separated from one another. The conversation would be
limited to a text-only channel such as a computer keyboard and
screen so that the result would not be dependent on the
machine's ability to render words as speech. If the evaluator
cannot reliably tell the machine from the human (Turing
originally suggested that the machine would convince a human

4. 70% of the time after five minutes of conversation), the
machine is said to have passed the test. The test does not check
the ability to give correct answers to questions, only how
closely answers resemble those a human would give.
The test was introduced by Alan Turing in his 1950 paper
"Computing Machinery and Intelligence," while working at The
University of Manchester (Turing, 1950; p. 460). It opens with
the words: "I propose to consider the question, 'Can machines
think?'" Because "thinking" is difficult to define, Turing
chooses to "replace the question by another, which is closely
related to it and is expressed in relatively unambiguous
words."[4] Turing's new question is: "Are there imaginable
digital computers which would do well in the imitation game?"”
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test)
Turing’s life was documented in the movie “The Imitation
Game” (2014).
Even though more than sixty years have passed there still are
annual contests for “chatbots” which are based on the Turing
test. It is important to remember that this test is about
humanity, not knowledge. Thus IBM’s Watson has great
knowledge but does not attempt to interact with people in a
realistic way. On the other hand, real people can be odd. They
can change topic on a whim, they can misunderstand, and they
can be ignorant. Keep this in mind as you chat.
Here are four general attempts to create a machine which might
respond in some ways like a human. You only need to comment
on three of them The first two may be a bit odd.
Winner of the Leobner Prize (Prize in AI for Chatbots) in 2013
http://www.mitsuku.com/B1 Specific comments about your
interaction with this chatbot.

5. http://www.jabberwacky.com/
B2 Specific comments about your interaction with this chatbot.
http://www.abenteuermedien.de/jabberwock/
BE sure to select English!You must hit SEND after each
entry!!!!
B3 Specific comments about your interaction with this chatbot.

6. http://alice.pandorabots.com/
Chatbots as a commercial product
B4 Specific comments about your interaction with this chatbot.
B5 A general overview of your experience with chatbots
Part C: Captchas
This is a kind of reverse Turing test – you have to prove you are
human. CAPTCHA stands for Completely Automated Public
Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. Read the brief
explanations at:
http://recaptcha.net/
and
http://www.captcha.net/
C1 Explain in your own words what a Captcha is and why they
good.
C2 Now read this and tell me why they are bad

7. http://www.captcha.net/ include a discussion of this alternative
http://sweetcaptcha.com/