Introduction:What Landmarks Are, and Why They Are Important - Landmarks: GIScience for Intelligent Services - page 20

robot finds useful are not necessarily the landmarks a person would identify and use
in an environment, and the spatial representations are different. Now, the imitation
game only requires that a person and a machine can communicate, or more precisely
that a machine can communicate on the person's terms, independent of its internal
structures.
Accordingly, John McCarthy explained more recently the term artificial intelli-
gence in the following dialog 7 :
Q. What is artificial intelligence?
A. It is the science and engineering of making intelligent machines, especially intelligent
computer programs. It is related to the similar task of using computers to understand
human intelligence, but AI does not have to confine itself to methods that are biologically
observable.
Q. Yes, but what is intelligence?
A. Intelligence is the computational part of the ability to achieve goals in the world. Varying
kinds and degrees of intelligence occur in people, many animals and some machines.
Q. Isn't there a solid definition of intelligence that doesn't depend on relating it to human
intelligence?
A. Not yet. The problem is that we cannot yet characterize in general what kinds of
computational procedures we want to call intelligent. We understand some of the
mechanisms of intelligence and not others.
Also, more recently critique of the imitation game has been expressed, for example
by French [ 13 , 14 ] . His critique is not about the validity of Turing's argument, but
the relevance of the test. He argues that perfect imitation would include making the
same mistakes. This is a critical argument for the domain of human spatial cognition,
where it is well documented that people make systematic errors of judgement
(some of them are discussed later in this topic). Assuming a player of the imitation
game has read about the weaknesses of human spatial judgement, she could try to
take advantage of it in a Turing test and may triumph to identify the communication
partner as a machine because it does not show these weaknesses. However,
theoretically, the computer could know this as well and skew its (undistorted)
results accordingly, even randomly, to perfectly mislead the player. But what would
be the purpose of building such a machine? Wouldn't it be more useful, French
asks, to leave the machine making undistorted results and communicate them in
human terms to a 'user', which is a person in a concrete decision making situation?
Wouldn't that be smart?
People do not only make systematic errors of judgement in their spatial reason-
ing, they are also varying in their spatial (communication) skills (e.g., [ 5 ] ). Along
the same line of argument, it does appear smart only to build machines of best
(human) reasoning and communication skills. As French writes: “The way forward
in AI does not lie in an attempt to flawlessly simulate human cognition, but in
trying to design computers capable of developing their own abilities to understand
the world and in interacting with these machines in a meaningful manner” ([ 14 ] ,
p. 77). Instead, French postulates that, in order to achieve artificial intelligence,
7 http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/whatisai/whatisai.html , last visited 3/1/2014.