Brian Clegg's Blog, page 158

Am I human?

A not-chatbotI hear that at the Techniche Festival (whatever that is) in Guwahati, India, a chatbot finally beat the Turing test (sort of). A chatbot is a bit of software that emulates human conversation, while the Turing test is supposed to show that if an artificial intelligence can fool you into thinking your are typing to a human, then the technology has finally come of age.

In the test 30 volunteers typed conversations, half with a human, half with a chatbot. Then an audience of 1334 people (including the volunteers) voted on which was which. A total of 59% though Cleverbot was human, making the organisers (and New Scientist) claim it had passed the Turing test.

By comparison 63% of the voters thought the human participants were human. This can be a bit embarrassing for human participants who are thought to be a computer (there's rather a nice description of taking part in this process in the book The Most Human Human ).

I don't think this is really a success under the Turing test. First, they only have a 4 minute chat, which gives chatbot designers an opportunity to use short-term tactics that wouldn't work in a real extended conversation, which I envisage is what Turing had in mind. And then there's the location of the event. A key piece of information that is missing is how many of the voters had English as a first language. If, as I suspect, many of the voters did not, or spoke English with distinctly different idioms, their ability to spot which was human and which wasn't would inevitably be compromised.

See what you think. You can chat to Cleverbot yourself here.

Picture from Wikipedia

The joy of car insurance

When new parents moan about the cost of having a baby – buying a push chair and a car seat and a cot and so on – I nod sagely and hide a knowing smile. 'Just wait,' I am thinking, 'until that baby is 17.'

For non-UK readers, 17 is the age at which our young are let loose on the road in cars. Even if you manage to resist the constant nagging to buy a car ('Everyone else's parents are buying them cars. Why are you too tight to buy me a car? It's not fair!'), the expense and organization involved with making this happen is phenomenal.
First there's getting a provisional licence. Then the wallet-sapping experience of driving lessons. Tests to pay for and arrange, of course (though you can now book these online – but always go to the direct.gov.uk site, there are rip-off sites that charge a fee). And did anyone mention insurance? Still, it's all worth it when they pass the test, rip up the L-plates (more expense) and you can see the smile on their faces. Well, no, it's not really worth it – but there is the consolation of not having to drive them all over the place any more. There's just the matter of forking out for petrol, servicing and, yes, even more insurance.
Still, once they get to this stage you can relax, and this is exactly what we did with the daughter who has passed her test. Until the day we got the call saying, was it okay, she just wanted to drive down to Bristol. Okay, fine. Some trepidation. But it wasn't until a little later that a horrible thought occurred to us. What if she broke down? Because we had thought we'd arranged everything, but not breakdown cover. High speed resorting to the internet and a few minutes later she had this too.
Please don't tell me if I've forgotten anything else. I really don't want to know. But excuse me next time someone tells me how much you have to sort out with a baby if I burst into hysterical laughter.

The lottery insight

A while ago I mentioned how those who criticize people who enter the National Lottery as stupid individuals that don't understand probability miss the point, because it's a relatively low investment you can forget about, in return for quite a lot of pleasure occasionally when you do win something.

We can also use the mechanism of a lottery to explore how human beings get their gratification.

One of the UK's National Lottery games is called Thunderball. The player has to choose 5 numbers between 1 and 39, and a sixth number between 1 and 14. The maximum prize for matching all six is £500,000, while you get £3 for just matching the Thunderball.

Imagine two strategies, both costing £14. One is to play the same set of numbers each week for 14 weeks. The other is to play 14 lines on a single night, using all the numbers between 1 and 39, shuffled, to populate the first 5 (you would have to do this nearly twice), and sequential numbers from 1 to 14 as the Thunderball.

Most people, I think would prefer to have 1 go a week for 14 weeks, rather than blow it all on one week. Yet the second strategy is the better of the two in terms of being certain to win. Both strategies have the same chance of winning the jackpot. But the second strategy ensures you win a minimum of £3, and that you are guaranteed to match at at least five of your numbers. The first strategy could go through the whole 14 weeks and never have a single match. (Admittedly, it's slightly more complicated than this, as in principle with the first strategy you could win 14 times, where with the second, your maximum number of wins is likely to be 3. But the fact remains that one is a certainty and the other isn't.)

What this shows, I think, is that the primary enjoyment value of the lottery is anticipation. The first strategy gives you 14 nights when you could be a winner. ('It could be you!' as the slogan goes.) The second strategy only gives you one night. So even though the chances of winning something are better, it will tend to be less attractive.

Whatever happened to climate change?

A few years ago I wrote a couple of books on green topics (Ecologic and The Global Warming Survival Kit) -and the timing was terrible.

In the first place, after selling a storm, people suddenly stopped buying books on climate change. I think initially it was exciting and scary - but then it began to feel hopeless, and you don't want to read about hopelessness. Secondly, the financial crash and recession hit. You can protest as much as you like that our financial problems don't make climate change go away, but they certainly make it easy to ignore.

Here's the thing. I don't think we're going to do much about climate change until things get fairly dire for a sizeable chunk of the world. We're lucky in Europe that we won't get much of the really bad impacts at that stage. But a lot of people may suffer. And I also suspect that as much as possible, we are going to invent our way out of the problem, rather than go backwards and stop doing things - and this isn't necessarily a bad thing. After all, whether green hairshirted types like it or not, despite the 'dark satanic mills', things are a lot better now for the vast majority of people than they were in the green, bucolic medieval times. Because we invented our way out of it.

Some claim this means we should give up even trying to be green. I don't agree. There's no harm in slowing things down. It gives us more time to invent our way out. But if I'm really, really honest, most of the green things I do have an ulterior motive. So, for example:
I recycle - but this means I don't run out of room in the wheelie binI don't fly - but this is because I don't like flying, and I did enough to last a lifetime when I was at BAI drive a small, low emissions car - but if I won £10 million on the lottery tomorrow, I would be off down to the Aston Martin showroom before you could say 'Jeremy Clarkson'I use low energy bulbs, have a well insulated house and all that - because I'm tight and want to save on fuel costsI walk to the shops rather than drive - to save money, because I hate faffing about in busy car parks and for my health So, please do keep being green. Keep doing good things. But maybe it's time we got a little more realistic.

Punk Rock People Management

One of the joys of doing occasional training in creativity is that I get to meet some great people, and one of the most remarkable I've had the pleasure of working alongside is Peter Cook. Peter combines business training and rock music (not always at the same time) - can't be bad.

He has just come out with a book on managing people (primarily from an HR perspective), taking what he describes as a punk rock approach. You've got to love it for the cover alone. Inside, he takes key areas of dealing with staff and gives them a serious working over. Often the 'punk rock' approach involves stripping out all the fancy stuff and getting back to basics, which is why the chapters are just double page spreads. Frankly a lot of this stuff is much simpler than HR professionals would have you believe - and Punk Rock People Managment is excellent at showing where the Emperor's New Clothes are in action.

The best news is that, at the moment the book is free in PDF format. I downloaded it to my iPad where it was an easy read in Apple's ebook reader. But if you don't fancy an ebook, you can also buy a solid version.

If you have to manage people, it's well worth taking a look. It's not as transformative as Ricardo Semler's Maverick , which I think is just about the best business book ever written, but there's a lot of common sense and cutting away the deadwood.

And did I mention it's free?

Free books and moral dilemmas

Yes, one book in the whole of the UK. And what
a surprise, it's in London.
I was interested to read about the Guardian's attempt to get us all leaving books all over the place for other people to find. Apparently they've conned 15,000 copies out of publishers which they (what, just the Guardian staff?) are going to leave randomly about the place, and they are encouraging the rest of us to do likewise. You can even download a special bookplate to paste into your book for the purposes.

What's more there's a funky map showing where all the books have been left or found, though when I looked it only had one book on it, left by the Guardian's literary editor (Gormenghast, how... literary).

I really can't make up my mind if this is:
A very good idea that will encourage people to read moreGoing to result in lots of people (e.g. staff in a cafe where you leave a book/street cleaners) picking up books as rubbish and binning themA typical wishy-washy Guardian idea that's great fun (isn't it, Jacinda?) and totally pointlessThe trouble is, if I took part, and if I could resist giving a book I wrote away, my inclination would be to give a book I really hate. After all, the books I love I want to keep and read again. And then I would have to lie on the bookplate and sing its praises, when really I think it's total rubbish. Do these Guardian people realize the moral dilemmas they are creating?

A new website is born

Small fanfare of trumpets. I'd like to announce the arrival of a new website, www.universeinsideyou.com - like most babies, it doesn't do much at the moment. In fact it's just a placeholder really. It may gurgle occasionally, but no nappies are involved.

The website is for the followup to Inflight Science . The Universe Inside You uses your own body as a vehicle to explore everything from quantum theory to the workings of the brain.

The book won't be out until next April, but when it is published, like Inflight Science it will feature a range of experiments to try out. By putting some of these onto the website, they can be made more interactive and (hopefully) interesting.

The other thing the website will bring is links to find out more about other books where you can read more on a topic you've got a taster of in the book.This was something several reviews of Inflight Science said would be useful.

For the moment, though, it's just an opportunity to take a better look at the cover than the small version above. I rather like the cover - it matches the cover of the new paperback version of Inflight Science, out on 5 January, of which there's a sneak preview below:

Ooh, I just had a McGurk moment

I'm currently reading for review Brain Bugs (my fingers wanted to type Brian Bugs, hmm) by Dean Buonomano. (I'll link to the review when it's available.) This is an exploration of the human brain, using the things it gets wrong as a way of understanding it better.

On mental glitch it mentions is the McGurk effect. This is well known, so you may have come across it already, but if you haven't, it's a great one. What it demonstrates is the way that the brain's processing of sensory information can result in us receiving a false impression of what's going on.

Take a look at the video below. It's important you have the sound on, as I want you to see what the guy says.



Now replay the video, but this time, close your eyes as soon as you click the replay button and listen the sound of the whole clip without the picture.

It's exactly the same video, and exactly the same sound 'Ba ba, ba ba, ba ba.' But when your eyes see the lips forming the 'Da da' sound, your brain gives more weight to your eyes than your ears and translates the electrical impulses from your ears as 'Da da' instead of 'Ba ba.' Try it watching the video again. You can't force yourself to hear 'Ba ba' even though you know that's what he is saying.

Yet another excellent example of the way our senses don't provide us with a video camera like snapshot of what is out there, but rather the brain's interpretation of what it thinks is happening. Excellent!

Welcome back, Mr Galton

Nothing to do with eugenics, but a note by Francis
Galton that messed up Eadweard Muybridge's career
I was recently reading for review Lone Frank's interesting book on gene tests and their implications, My Beautiful Genome . It makes a point that really hadn't occured to me before, raised in a discussion between Ms Frank and Armand Leroi, the author of another interesting human biology book, Mutants . And it concerns the dark side of genetics.

Many aspects of science have their dark sides. Nuclear physics - wonderful... nuclear bombs - not so wonderful. Similarly, genetics has transformed biology, but its dark side is eugenics, the brainchild of Victorian scientist Francis Galton.

Eugenics has a kind of logic, but most people find it distasteful. The idea is that genes alone should be enough to determine who will have the best children, and so you should use genes to determine who should breed and who shouldn't. (That's a vast oversimplification, but it gives a flavour.)

What Leroi pointed out to Frank is that despite the fact that eugenics is a dirty word, we operate a kind of neo-eugenics, that is generally not regarded as a problem unless it is given that loaded name. Thousands of abortions are carried out every year of fetuses that have some detected defect, physical or genetic. What is this if it's not a kind of eugenics?

I think what this illustrates is the important consideration that labels are not good ways of making decisions. 'Eugenics' as a label comes will all sorts of baggage, and at its worst, the concept is despicable. But the fact remains most people are comfortable with the process described above. Applying moral decisions to science and technology is rarely a black and white process, and should never be based on labels alone.

Coming over all boustrophedon

Awful cover - I much prefer
the older oneI was reading an old Morse book at the weekend to have a break from science. Specifically Service of All the Dead. This is not my favourite of Colin Dexter's novels. The plot is ridiculously unlikely. And the attitude to homosexuality (pretty well equated with paedophilia) and women ('You're a pretty little thing,' being a commonplace and inoffensive sort of comment) seems more 1960s than 1979 when the book was written. But it did get me thinking.

Specifically, at one point Morse is searching a church and Dexter says he does this boustrophedon. My immediate reaction was to think he was showing off, and this was a classic example of using a word many people didn't know just for the sake of it. As it happens I did know what it meant. It was originally a form of writing where, having reached the end of the line, the writer starts the next line at the same end, writing the next line backwards. Then starts at the usual end again and writes forwards. And so on. The term comes from the way parallel furrows are ploughed (by an ox).

Thinking Dexter was showing off, I thought 'Why didn't he just say that Morse zig-zagged up and down the pews?' This would certainly be easier to understand. But on giving it a bit more thought, to be fair to Dexter, it's not quite the same thing. A zig-zag should be like the letter Z, with the connecting back movement at an angle. You don't do that with ploughing or writing, and you can't do that if, like Morse, you are constrained by church pews. Technically you have to go boustrophedon.

So here's the dilemma. I still think Dexter was showing off, and I still think that it's not a good idea to use words most people don't understand (and all but a tiny fraction won't bother to look up). This reduces your ability as a writer to communicate. Yet at the same time, it was, without doubt, the right word. I think maybe I would have engineered some way for Lewis to calling it zig-zagging, so Morse could correct him and introduce the proper term. But I can't really falt Colin Dexter for using the word that does the job best.


See Service of All the Dead at Amazon.co.uk and at Amazon.com