Science, Technology & Health: March 2004 Archives

I finally got my home network up and running! I'm running Windows 2000 and was having problems getting the computers on the LAN to see each other. They can all access the internet just fine, but when I'd go to "Network Neighborhood", "Find Computer", or "Computers Near Me" I'd get a big fat nothing.

Having exhausted all the logical possiblities, I decided to try something nonsensical. I went into my network connection properties and added the "NWLink IPX/SPX/NetBios Compatible Transport Protocol" protocol... and voila! Everything's peachy-keen! Just insert a few hours of frustration into the story and you'll get an idea for how exciting my life has been recently.

Science News Online has an article about two high school students who each made significant contributions to the study of near-earth objects as a part of this year's Intel Science Talent Search. Both projects have the advantage of being obvious but hitherto undeveloped applications of existing theory to this emerging (and important) field. Go read the article for details.

The usefulness of simultaneous parallax measurements is a strong argument in favor building a lunar observatory. We can currently achieve measurements from earth with a large angular separation by sampling six months apart, but that won't do much good for calculating the positions of fast-moving objects.

(HT: GeekPress.)

Well, there's a heck of a lot artificial intelligence can't do yet, but in this post I'm going to give an example of a conversation that no computer program can have. There's no existing theory that explains how humans are capable of this either.

a: What is the capital of Spain?
b: Madrid.
a: Why did you say Madrid?
b: Because you asked what the capital of Spain is.
a: Why did you answer?
b: Because we're having a conversation.
a: How did you know the capital of Spain?
b: I looked it up on Google.
a: Why did you do that?
b: Because you wanted to know, and I didn't know already.
a: Why did you want to find the answer to my question?
b: Because I felt like it.
a: Why did you feel like it?
b: I like to be helpful.
a: Why do you like to be helpful?
b: It makes me feel good.
a: Why do you like to feel good?

And so forth. Humans can go on like this forever, explaining their feelings and notions in ever-increasing detail, as abstractly as necessary. We don't really know why we feel certain ways, but we can guess based on our history and experience and make ourselves understood to each other -- because our brains all work in the same general way. We may not be able to verbalize it all, but when someone says "you know what I mean", we do.

Computers don't. No computer program can explain its own workings to you. Why? Because you'd have to create code that did the explaining, and then you'd have to create code that explained that code, and so forth. The series of "why?" questions can go on uniquely forever. No one knows how we handle it, and no one knows how to make a computer do it.

Although I don't believe computers are smart enough to detect human pedophiles, I bet it wouldn't be too hard to develop a system that could reliably discern between chatbots and humans. (Cameron Marlow suggested to me in an email that it would be valuable for CS students to consider how they're able to tell the difference themselves -- what cues they notice and how they do their classification.)

With the current state of the natural language processing art, I think the classification problem is pretty trivial. A computer system could be fed samples of transcripts with human and robot participants, and little more than a statistical analysis would be necessary to categorize the differences. After all, computers can already tell the difference between male and female authors with 80% accuracy.

Just for fun, go try the gender genie with some text written by you (or your favorite author). Pasting in the front page of my blog reveals that I'm male!

Words: 8388

(NOTE: The genie works best on texts of more than 500 words.)

Female Score: 10987
Male Score: 17405

The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: male!

Whew!

In my previous posts about Zicam I've noted that it's helped me twice overcome a cold more quickly than I would have without it. Well, I'm getting sick again, and that's three times in seven weeks, which is highly unusual for me. I rarely ever get sick.

I wonder if taking Zicam is somehow preventing my body from completely eliminating the sickness? Once I start taking Zicam I'll feel better in a couple of days, but then a few weeks later I'll start coming down with the same cold again. Has anyone else had a similar experience?

Chatbots may not yet be able to catch pedophiles, but these Infocombots perform an even more entertaining function: they allow you to play all your old favorite text adventure games via AOL Instant Messanger! An excellent -- and in hindsight, obvious -- merging of two great inventions, courtesy of Andy Baio.

(HT: Dean Esmay.)

Fans of socialized medicine: take note of the British system (link perishable) (here's a new link, thanks to TMLutas).

A TOP brain surgeon has been suspended from work in a dispute over a bowl of soup, London's DAILY MAIL is reporting on Monday.

Terence Hope is accused of taking an extra helping at the staff canteen without paying.

The GBP 80,000-a-year neurosurgeon has been sent home on full pay from the Queen's Medical Centre in Nottingham, a teaching hospital where he is a senior lecturer as well as a consultant.

Colleagues are furious at the decision. They say patients will suffer while the NHS is deprived of a highly-skilled expert at a time when there is already a critical shortage of neurosurgeons. ...

Patients' groups were also stunned. The Trigeminal Neuralgia Association said: 'This does seem extraordinary. Any patient would be astounded.'

The waiting time for brain operations in the Nottingham region is officially 39 days for outpatients.

A report last year revealed that hundreds of doctors are left kicking their heels at home for months or even years because of bosses' incompetence at settling disputes. The National Audit Office said many cases do not even involve patient safety but are the result of personality clashes with managers.

Between April 2001 and July 2002 - the last available figures - more than 1,000 NHS doctors, nurses and other clinical staff were suspended on full pay.

From the soldiers on the field, to a general at a press conference, to reporters, to the internet, to my home computer... it's amazing that I can read combat reports from the remote mountains of Pakistan delayed by mere hours. Friendly forces may have a High Value Target isolated in three square miles of snow? That's probably more than the HVT knows.

Even our stock market is a-flutter, eager for news from ten thousand miles away. You've gotta catch him! Our futures and options contracts are riding on it!

New Scientist has an article about a software system called ChatNannies that purports to engage pedophiles in chat room conversations in an effort to catch them "grooming" children for real-life meetings. There's a transcript of one such conversation, and the creator claims the program is so effective that no one has caught on yet.

As an expert in artificial intelligence I'm extremely skeptical, and I'll explain why.

First, there are details in the article that just don't make sense.

The nanniebots do such a good job of passing themselves off as young people that they have proved indistinguishable from them. In conversations with 2000 chatroom users no one has rumbled the bots, [Jim] Wightman [the author] says. ...

Wightman currently has 100,000 bots chatting away undetected in chatrooms - the most he can generate on the four internet servers at his IT practice. He would like to build more but funding is the sticking point, as he does not want anyone to profit financially from his technology.

He's got 100,000 bots running, but only 2000 conversations in which the bot has gone undetected. That's a miserably low success rate, and actually quite believable. I suspect these numbers were intended to mean something else, but what?

Then there's Wightman's reluctance to reveal details of the system to anyone.

One of its tricks is to use the internet itself as a resource for its information on pop culture. Wightman will not reveal how it judges what is reliable information and what not. He does say, however, that each bot has dozens of parameters that are assigned at random, to give each one a different "personality". ...

"Some companies have offered fantastic sums of money, but all want technology ownership. And that's something that isn't going to happen," he says. Instead, he hopes eventually to get financial support from government-run organisations that focus on child protection.

If this is a fraud, it would be a lot easier and safer to profit from government hand-outs than to actually risk revealing the "system" to technically-savvy investors. This is why reputable scientists publish the details of their research.

Interestingly, the transcript does include a few hints that it's likely machine-generated. In this script, "B" is the purported machine and "A" is the human.

B - pancake day! i love pancakes...mmmm so tasty A - yeah me too, but i forget every damn year B - did you forget this year?

The response by B is very script-ish. Notice also that B's responses are longer on average than A's. That's a sign of a poor (i.e., standard) conversation routine. It's very hard to generate complex sentence structures that sound natural.

Here's another interaction, with my comments.

B - oh cool. did you watch robocop 2 last night? A - what side was it on? B - sky one A - we haven't got sky A - but i've seen it before A - it wasn't as good as robocop B - i agree, though it was cool in places.

Canned response, ok.

A - did you watch robocop last night B - yes, i just said i did! A - no you said you watched robocop 2 not robocop - so which one was it? B - robocop 2 - pedant!

Interesting confusion of tokens. The system splits the "robocop 2" token on its own, or assumes that A is using shorthand for the same token. This leads to confusion for the robot, which is fine, but there's no way it could be smart enough to untangle the subsequent miscomprehension. The usage of "pedant" after a dash as an exclamation feels made up. It's not a very natural chat construction, particularly for a child, and I can't imagine a robot could so easily identify the source of confusion and label it so appropriately.

A - not robocop or robocop 3 or robocop the series B - it was definitely robocop 2, the one with kain the second robocop in it. i haven't seen robocop 3 or the series.

If the system is genuine, this is a remarkable feat of comprehension. Most humans would be confused by this point.

Anyway, this conversation could be machine generated, but I suspect it's not representative of how any real system interacts with humans on a consistent basis.

Beyond all this, the creator claims the software can reliably detect pedophiles based on non-sexual conversations? No way. Human children and parents can't even do that face-to-face, and we're finely tuned to pick up on vocal, physical, and conversational cues that aren't present in text chats.

Furthermore, he promotes his "utterly free service" on message boards. He makes incredible claims on his homepage:

The most technologically advanced AI construct ever conceived and built. The NannieBot spawns and controls a large number of virtual internet users, whose behaviour is indistinguishable from humans interacting on the internet. The first AI construct to effortlessly pass the 'Turing Test', after more than 13 hours of conversation the AI was still undiscovered!

The only thing is, I don't see the catch. He asks for sponsors and donations, but he doesn't directly charge money for the software. Of course, the software isn't released yet, and they're auctioning off the first public chat with their robot on eBay. Maybe he really is hoping some government will fund his project?

Any system can occasionally hit a home run, but the claims in this article are not credible, in my opinion. Go here to chat with some of the best existing real chatbots; none of them are anywhere near the capabilities claimed by Wightman.

(HT: GeekPress.)

Update:
Via Apothecary's Drawer and Waxy.org I see that a grad student at MIT named Cameron Marlow managed to secure an exclusive interview with one of the NannieBots. From the transcipt he's posted it's virtually certain he was talking to a human posing as a robot.

The secret to a good scam is knowing how far you can go before you cross the line into absurdity. Jim Wightman doesn't have a clue.

Can anyone find solid information to support the legend that Karl Landsteiner's discovery of human blood types was widely disbelieved initially because it revealed that up to 25% of children could not possibly have been the offspring of the men their mothers claimed?

So far, no evidence of life on Mars. Looks like there was water, however.

My opinion is that we'll never find life anywhere other than on earth. I can't explain why, it's just a hunch. I'll be pretty excited if I'm wrong.