"George Plimpton" wrote in message
...
On 3/13/2012 11:28 AM, Hawke wrote:
On 3/12/2012 1:51 PM, anorton wrote:
The real author, George Plimpton, once put out a criticism/challenge to
the AI community saying - regarding a chess-playing computer - that,
"The machine isn't going to walk out of the hotel there and start doing
extraordinary things. It can't manage a baseball team, can't tell you
what to do with a bad marriage"

The George Plimpton who has been posting copious off-topic stuff here
(what real person has time for that) has been infuriating folks of all
political stripes by ignoring the real gist of arguments, resorting to
insults when all else fails, and responding with occasional
non-sequitors. All of these are characteristics of the bots created to
try to pass the Turing test and win the Loebner prize. The last clue to
me though was his mistaking the thread about home scale steel production
as a political thread.


Nah, he's real. I can tell. He's one of those super egotistical guys
that thinks that because he has a college degree that he knows more than
anyone else.

Nope. I never talk about how much I know. Where you're concerned, I talk
about what you *don't* know - usually because you *can't* know it.

So, George, bots have a difficult time with simple math word problems. If
you can answer this one below, it might help clear things up. Avoiding a
direct answer pretty much means you are a machine.

Alice and Bob go on a forty mile road trip. Alice drives for 20 minutes and
then they take a five minute rest break after which Frank drives 20 minutes.
What was their average speed?