Purple Monkey Dishwasher

I'm thinking it couldn't be too hard to write a program that automatically responds to 90% of creationist posts.

tgamble

It would be pretty easy really.

Just do a search for a few key words (transitional fossils, thermodynamics, Behe etc.) and come up with url's or a standard response based on each case.

There hardly seems to be a point through. I look at a post and instantly know of a dozen sites that refute the specific arguments.

What that means I'll leave up to the reader to figure out.

KeithHarwood

Bloody software engineers. Automating everything, taking away all the fun in life.

Yes, it would be very easy. A minor tweek of the Eliza (aka Doctor) program written in the late 1960's, early 70's. All it needs is a bit of training and a database of Oolon's and Patrick's posts.

It would be equally easy to automate the creationists' posts. The travesty generators of the same era would work, using a database from Hovind and Ham.

And then we could set them both running, like that experiment with Ractor versus Eliza. We could then have them posting everything to E/C.

But maybe that has already happened. Maybe I'm the only human here. Maybe I'm not even human myself, just a process running Eliza.

Damn. I've just automated myself out of existence.

gallo

Take consolation in the following, Keith.

While it may at first appear that an AI autobot to respond to creationist posts would be simple, I don't believe it would be as easy as it may seem at first.

There is an old axiom in programming: as soon as you make a program idiot proof, along comes another idiot. In one shop where I worked there was this cute little girl that was the QC for about 10 programmers. It didn't matter how carefully you wrote a program, it came back with a list of bugs. While you may be able to recognize 80-90% of the idiocy, someone is going to post something that you didn't think of, and your program either halts or goes into a loop.

Now you can try to keep tweeking your program, but that will be a never ending task. Especially when you consider that creationists arguments are sometimes contradictory. Evolution is impossible but millions of species "adapted" from a few "kinds" in a few years after the FLUD. I don't see any way to avoid the problem where the evolution is impossible v. evolution is required dilemma is encountered. You end up with the program being passed between two conflicting subroutines.

No. I don't think it can be done. AI presumes some sort of intelligence, and creationism just doesn't fill the bill.

lpetrich

That's certainly a fun joke at the expense of creationists, but I think that the AI state-of-the-art is too primitive to imitate the smarter creationists.

With all the development in hardware and software capabilities, AI has lagged far behind; it has been a great disappointment for me.

I've checked out some chatterbot software, as it is called,and none of it acts very smart. Though I'd certainly like to see counterexamples. Any recommendations?

Reading A.M. Turing's famous paper <a href="http://www.abelard.org/turpap/turpap.htm" target="_blank">"Computing Machinery and Intelligence"</a>, I find this assertion:
The first prediction has come to pass -- 128 megabytes is nowadays a common amount of RAM, but the second one, that some chatterbot could seem human, could not. Turing's famous test is essentially whether some software with chatterbot capabilities could seem difficult to distinguish from any of our species, especially the more linguistically competent members.

There are some other fun things in Mr. Turing's paper, like a ca.-1950 computer, the "Manchester Machine", having only 20K of RAM.

And this theological argument:
Mr. Turing points out that God could always give a soul to a computer if he sees fit, in the way that he could give one to an elephant.

[ July 01, 2002: Message edited by: lpetrich ]</p>

Dark Jedi

I dunno. The creationist areguements are so rank and file, cut and paste that I sometimes wonder if it is just some robot regurgitating what it is told to.

Oops, kind of the definition of a creationist, isn't it?

JayAitch

So maybe a Evobot could cope with bad creationist arguments, but what about bad creationist spelling?

[ July 02, 2002: Message edited by: JayAitch ]</p>

HomerOfBorg

Have you tried talking to <a href="http://alice.sunlitsurf.com/alicechat.html" target="_blank">ALICE</a>? She believes in God but I didn't ask her if she was a creationist. But then again she's not my type, so I didn't want to get too personal.

Dark Jedi

I asked Alice: "Is there a god?"

She answered: "Of course I believe in God."

I asked "Why?"

The site paused, then went 404....

A little while later, I tried again. Same questions, this time In get an answer: "Because Dr. Richard S. Wallace programmed me for it."

Programming does have a lot to do with religion....

DMB

I tried asking "what is god?" and got the answer "I think of God as a Who not a What". So then I wrote "define god" and got the same reply.