The Turing Test is a classic in AI. On one side of the screen is you, and on the other side there’s either a human typing to you, or a computer generating text to you. A computer system passes the Turing Test if you can’t tell the difference between the computer and a human.
But when the human is a religious ranter, it tends to lower the bar a bit.
So here’s your test. One of the following text blocks is a bit of an email I got today from ‘Günter’, a poor soul trapped in two false beliefs: that supernatural beings exist, and that he can write comprehensible English.
The other block of text was made with a simple Markov chain trained on word trigrams from Günter’s email.
Sample number one:
Every thing, Love is a ground-need, without Love no Feelings are working, no human can find anymore satisfaction no matter what he trays to do it, the highest law of God, and no grace. Not even when somebody used your Authority-shyness like always, it is exactly the same. With Love the Apocalypse is running for ten years. {Glasshouse-effect? Global warming ?}.You can easy scientific prove, it is up to you. Jesus said <I came on earth to bring the Love and only where the Love and how to do Love, try it and you have to feel it. John says <even when you are doing what I say {that only is FAITH} and not only when you know about it>.Jesus said: sacrifice your self <you have to like them in any way, only give what you have<Logo>!
Number two:
That’s why Jesus said the End is near. The human where believing that Love is: cooking a meal; mending socks; squeeze a lemon; give Money, Tender; Fondness or even Sexuality. They filling up whole Libraries with books about Love, only in the explanation of the Old Testament {Torah; Koran; Kamathutra ;} or Jesus was never one interested. Jesus tried to teach Love and how to do it, the highest law of God. Out of the old scriptures he explained; proofing and showed in life what he is talking about. God says in the in the Old Testament; Torah; Koran; Kamathutra; <I m the Love and only the Love and only where the Love is can I be.> don’t make a picture or allegory {don’t compare me with nothing or nobody} of me. Never!!
Well, humans, which is the person, and which is the computer?
13 June 2008 at 10:23 am
I vote the computer as the former and person as the latter. The second one just seems to make a bit more sense.
13 June 2008 at 10:30 am
That’s a tricky one!!!
I think the second one seemed slightly more coherent, yet I’m guessing the first one is the human.
13 June 2008 at 11:40 am
I’m guessing the second one was Markov generated because it was more coherent.
13 June 2008 at 2:12 pm
I am voting the second as the computer generated because it has less spelting errors.
13 June 2008 at 2:52 pm
I’m thinking, human as the first sample and computermalator as the second.
14 June 2008 at 8:36 am
And the real Günter waaas…
Sample number 2.
I was interested in the idea that this or that text was somehow more coherent. Text coherence is a major part of NLP projects like text generation and discourse segmentation. Just for grins, would anyone care to articulate this idea of coherence? How do you know that one block of text is more coherent than another?
14 June 2008 at 11:11 am
There were two things in the first block of text that tipped me off, both based on the knowledge that the human is a religious nutter.
“With Love the Apocalypse is running for ten years,” didn’t sound like something a religious nutter would say. Love is good, ten-year apocalypse is bad. Love causing apocalypse makes no sense.
“You can easy scientific prove, it is up to you,” a religious nutter saying you can easily prove something with science? Unlikely.
18 June 2008 at 3:03 am
Hi, Daniel!
I picked the real Guenter, but got here after you gave the answer. Here’s what clued me in I think:
1. There’s a thesis (of sorts) in sample #2. “God is Love (and I can prove it!)” Although the argument isn’t precisely coherent, you can see his point. Also, the words “God”, “Love” and Scripture plus the names of scriptures recur frequently — an example, I think, of arguing by repetition. (i.e., if you keep saying something, people will agree it’s true.) #1 by contrast doesn’t seem to have a central point to make. There’s no sense of progress from sentence to sentence at all.
2. The words are rather simple and concrete in #2, as befits a rather conventional argument. #1 uses words that might pass muster in a New Age-y argument, maybe… but since they are not defined, they strike me as just dropped in there. #2, by contrast, talks about real things and everyday activities to define the terms love and god.
3. The parenthetical and quote marks mostly pair off in #2, but seem random in #1. I know a computer can do that kind of matchup, but I suspect that your 3-word algorithm has little cognizence of punctuation.
Those are my thoughts, for whatever they’re worth.
Shira