Re: Fame and television (was: Lavatory lids)

I was once stopped on the street by a stranger who had seen me on TV.
I had gone to an affair at MIT that was a sort of toy Turing test.
The room was lined with terminals, some of which were connected
remotely to human beings, and others to computers running programs
written to simulate human conversation. Judges & guests could step to
any keyboard & converse. To ease the challenge to the programmers,
each terminal announced the subject of its conversation. The official
judges were journalists not specializing in computers, and were fooled
by some remarkably crude programs. I was not fooled by any of them,
but afterward, one of them (subject: women's fashions), which I judged
to be the best of the lot by far, turned out to be not a program but a
woman. Someone with a camera interviewed me among others before that
revelation, and I admired the program that was not a program at some
length. I was not aware that the interview was broadcast, so when I
was hailed on the sidewalk in Brookline & told about it, I immediately
worried that that poor human would find out that she had fooled me
into thinking she was a computer program. To my relief, it turned out
that that part had not been broadcast.
--
--- Joe Fineman joe_f@xxxxxxxxxxx

||: Those who believe only what they can prove can generally :||
||: prove whatever they believe. :||
.

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