A Twisted Turing Test

While reading blog posts while I should have been working, I came across something that, to me, was funnier than anything I’ve read for the past 2 or 3 months, mostly because of my own experiences. As is my habit, my browsing pattern was as follows (we have Firefox tabs to thank for this breadcrumb trail):

I started on Bradley Horowitz’s blog (this post, where I’ve commented in the past), which linked to this site (a socially-networked trend predictor of some sort) which made reference to the term CAPTCHA on this page, which I proceeded to look up on Wikipedia from a link on that page, which in turn referenced the entry for “reverse Turing test“, which has a link to a guy’s blog entry about how he feels he’s failed the Turing test.

The juxtaposition of AIM sociology with artificial intelligence was nice, but the kicker was when he ended up consulting Eliza for help with the situation! The conclusion is a pitiful realization that not only is he mistaken for a robot, but Eliza calls into question his own humanity. Good stuph.

If none of this made sense to you or was even remotely funny, then just keep in mind I made this post completely for myself. I remember playing with Eliza on my old 8088 Epson computer back in the 80s, so this was, for me, ever-so-slightly nostalgic. I believe the specific version was called Endora, and it was written in Basic!

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