A mini Turing test

I have been thinking about this for a while now and decided to share it with you and get your opinions. The classic Turing test was intended as a way of conveying the strong AI viewpoint that when an entity displays intelligence behaviorally indistinguishable from a human then we have in fact created intelligence. These days we see the use of image based security in most account registration pages. Basically when you create an account on most public mail servers, etc., you may have to go through the step of keying in the characters you see in a provided image. The purpose behind this is to avoid robots, or automated programs, from creating accounts. Clearly then, this is a test that is intended to distinguish humans from non-intelligent machines. It is a form of a Turing test, although less encompassing. To me it appears like a really nice challenge to actually develop a program that can in fact recognize the characters in such images. Sure it is a tough problem, but it has the one nice feature. The image is expected to be unambiguously recognizable to any human creating an account. So I believe that must be a limit to which the characters in the image can be distorted or noise added. So, if we start off with a program that can handle images of a certain class (let us say images generated on a particular website), and progressively improve it to work for more and more web sites, then we might eventually get to the limit where no other image classes exist that are beyond the scope of our programs which are still readable by any human creating an account. If we reach such a point, then mail server companies might change to some other tests, but which still need to be mini Turing tests. We could then take that as the next challenge and continue.

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The physicists deserve some credit too...

1. Much of the philosophical work that may have anything to do with cognitive science is not exactly recent, but quite age-old. Christof Koch, one of the leading cognitive scientists of the day says that we 'see with our brains', implying that perception is not simply explicable by the optics of the situation, but involves substantial neural computation. Immanuel Kant in the 1700s took such a stand (though not on anatomical grounds) that perception involves subjective inner states and said ""It remains completely unknown to us what objects may be by themselves and apart from the receptivity of our senses. We know nothing but our manner or perceiving them; that manner being peculiar to us, and not necessarily shared by every being, though, no doubt, by every human being"

We may say that there is no recent, fresh, contemporary input from philosophy that especially drives neuroscience today. It is just that some findings happen to correspond to the speculations of classical philosophers.

2. The credit for systematizing the field is deserved by physicists more than philosophers. Without the work of Helmholtz and other early founders of psychophysics, many of the experimental paradigms which are still the mainstay of cognitive science, might never have been developed.

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Pattern recognition

According to Voltaire, "If there were no god, it would be necessary to invent one.”The human mind seems to have developed uncanny capacity of discover patterns in their environment; evolutionarily this makes sense, as recognition of patterns of danger can prolong life and enhance chances of reproduction. Maybe the human mind creates a god, in a desperate attempt to categorize those events, which its limited capacity cannot comport to a logical, discernable pattern. The discussion of the phenomena of human belief in god is interesting and relevant because every human culture seems to worship some type of deity.