Wandering through the gallery, the judges are us, and what is being tested is our response to the machines. Instead, it turns the spotlight on the imitation game’s human judges. That is a pity: newer chatbots have won the imitation game, and might have engaged visitors more with the artist’s conceptual concerns.īut in the end, it doesn’t really matter: this playful show is not meant to advance AI research or to amaze with convincing automata. However, despite Ruby’s 15 years of AI learning, she remains frustratingly obtuse in conversation. Only one work fully engages with machine thinking: Lynn Hershman Leeson’s veteran chatbot Agent Ruby. In 2016, that’s not enough for Furber’s team, which wants to reproduce real human thought in the detail of its neurological processes. In the show’s catalogue, Furber lays out the utilitarian reasons for building machines that play human, echoing Turing’s motivation to find out if machines can think – or at least, appear to think. Talk was too clunky to hold my attention for long, but there’s no doubting the scientists are playing the imitation game for real. They are also playing the imitation game: invade their personal space and one turns its head and video-projected eyes to you, before resuming its conversation with a “Where were we?” This technology animates Talk’s robot protagonists as they sit in a cosy living room gesticulating while discussing dreams, brains, consciousness and identity. As part of this hugely ambitious programme, a University of Manchester team led by Steve Furber built SpiNNaker, a massively parallel computer, to mimic the neural networks between our ears. Kjellmark was inspired by meeting scientists from the international Human Brain Project, which aims to create silicon-based simulations of working brains. More superficially likelike are the skeletal androids of Tove Kjellmark’s Talk. Elsewhere, there’s plenty on show for fans of robot aesthetics: James Capper‘s insectoid machines succeed in being both unmistakably biomorphic and industrial, while a boxy roaming robot built by Paul Granjon and autonomous wheelchairs by Mari Velonaki play on our effortless talent for responding emotionally to lifeless objects. Vintage tech lovers will linger, perhaps wistfully considering Manchester’s moment as a postwar Silicon Valley. His installation includes a recreation of the bulletin board used for programmer Christopher Strachey‘s enigmatic notes, along with the original teleprinter that output the messages, and an array of 1950s-style cathode ray tubes suspended in mid-air to display the program as it ran on the Ferranti Mark 1. Synthetic valentines like the one above appear in David Link’s LoveLetters_1.0. “It’s just as much about what we are able to project on to those things.” “They’re all totally flawed!” laughed curator Clare Gannaway. One way or another, the artworks all play the game, but none of them take it too seriously. Better known as the Turing test, the original imitation game posed the challenge of getting a machine to converse with a human so naturally that the exchange could be mistaken for one between humans. The Imitation Game takes its name from an experiment proposed by Alan Turing in 1950, while he was pioneering artificial intelligence research at the University of Manchester. That tricky question of the relationship between the human and the artificial is key to two new exhibitions in Manchester, this year’s European City of Science. It was both perverse and predictable that just five years after the birth of the modern computer, someone would use artificial intelligence to produce what machines neither need nor want. The answer, of course, was a gifted, under-occupied programmer. ![]() Designed to work on atomic bombs, X-ray crystallography and other serious science, what business had this Ferranti Mark 1 writing love letters? There was no great mystery about “MUC”, however: that could only be “Manchester University Computer”, the world’s first commercial programmable electronic computer. This was one of a number of enigmatic notes pinned to the computing department noticeboard at the University of Manchester, UK, back in August 1953.
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