I remember my first experience visiting the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry in Portland when I was a teenager. I had always been fascinated with sciences. So a playground of interactive exhibits with hands-on experiments was just my kind of thing. I particularly recall my first meeting a conversational chat-bot that they had installed which could output considerate responses to questions the user typed in. Dr. Know, as it was affectionately named, was an instantiation of the Eliza program from MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. It was an example of a Turing test, an idea put forward by Alan Turing , an early pioneer in computer programming. He theorized that computers would eventually be indistinguishable from humans once their logic structures matched those we form through socialization processes. The Turing test is a process of inquiry followed between a human and a robot that would be used to figure out if the robot was sentient or not. (Ironically, on the internet, se...
Musings on web development, apps and the future of the internet.