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Make Your PC

(Seem) Intelligent

Can your computer pass the Turing test? By Charles Platt

Can machines be intelligent? Computer pioneer Alan Turing suggested a test: put a person in front of a keyboard, communicating with a computer hidden at another location. If the computer can convince the person that he’s interacting with a human being, then for all practical purposes the computer is intelligent. This came to be known as the Turing test.

^{The trouble is, a computer can simulate intelligence DOWNLOAD THE} without actually being intelligent. As a very simple 2. PROVERBS CODE example, here’s a tiny program that you can type in Ignore the little splash screen about “The World of and modify, to fake the seemingly intelligent process JustBASIC” and click the window behind it. Now you of offering advice via proverbs. can copy-type the listing from Figure A (press Enter I chose to use proverbs because I think they’re at the end of each line), or download our copy: not really as smart as they seem. Also, new proverbs Program-pc.txt from makezine.com/15/upload_ are easy to construct because so many of them proverbs. In the JustBASIC File menu, choose Insert follow the same basic format of subject, verb, and File and open your downloaded copy. On the Mac, outcome. download Program-mac.txt, open it in a text editor,

For example, if you take “pride comes before a copy all the text, and paste it into the BASIC window. fall” and “crime doesn’t pay,” you can swap their subjects to get “pride doesn’t pay” or “crime comes before a fall,” and the new versions still seem to make sense.

I wrote the program in BASIC (Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) because even though it’s an old and limited computer language, it’s still the easiest for nonprogrammers to use, and it’s freely available online. In the tradition of MAKE, my program encourages you to hack it. You can insert different text to create new proverbs of your own design.

1. INSTALL THE PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE Mac users can try Chipmunk BASIC from nicholson. com/rhn/basic; the setup instructions are a little too lengthy to include here. For Windows users I suggest JustBASIC, a small but simple interpreter that costs nothing. Download it from justbasic.com/ download.html and install it, and you can run it without concern for viruses.

3. RUN THE PROGRAM Press Shift-F5 to run the Proverbs program (or Command-R on the Mac). If nothing seems to happen, check the status bar at the bottom of the window for messages such as “syntax error.” Correct your typing and try again. When the program runs successfully, it opens its own window displaying up to 40 new proverbs without repeating any pieces of them. Because the random number generator is reseeded by the system clock near the beginning, the program is likely to create entirely different words of wisdom whenever you launch it (the total number of permutations is 1,600).

4. WRITE YOUR OWN PROVERBS Now for the creative part. You can overwrite the current proverb text or add more. Just follow these rules:

96 Make: Volume 15