Only peripherally related: I remember reading an essay ages ago about someone, probably Hofstadter, being called in by a bunch of college students to administer a semi-Turing test (that is, talk to one system and decide whether it’s intelligent) to a particularly impressive system they’d encountered while hacking into computer networks, but I can’t find it now. Does anyone else share this recollection in a more useful form?
[EDITED to remove some details that I put in to help TheOtherDave tell whether we’re talking about the same thing. We were. It’s in Hofstadter’s “Metamagical Themas”. Details removed lest they spoil it for others.]
A few random extracts (i.e., bits that I happen to remember from the transcript) that may help determine whether this is what you had in mind: “I like to understand up without seventeen clams”; “What are arms? That information is classified.” “That’s nice. What else do you like to call ‘GEB’, Doug?”
Yeah, that’s the one I meant, although I’d been refraining from giving away the punchline. Thank you for the extra Googlable terms, though, they helped me find it! Somewhat embarrassingly, it’s on a webpage I had been looking at earlier while searching for it, just on the bottom half of it.
Only peripherally related: I remember reading an essay ages ago about someone, probably Hofstadter, being called in by a bunch of college students to administer a semi-Turing test (that is, talk to one system and decide whether it’s intelligent) to a particularly impressive system they’d encountered while hacking into computer networks, but I can’t find it now. Does anyone else share this recollection in a more useful form?
[EDITED to remove some details that I put in to help TheOtherDave tell whether we’re talking about the same thing. We were. It’s in Hofstadter’s “Metamagical Themas”. Details removed lest they spoil it for others.]
A few random extracts (i.e., bits that I happen to remember from the transcript) that may help determine whether this is what you had in mind: “I like to understand up without seventeen clams”; “What are arms? That information is classified.” “That’s nice. What else do you like to call ‘GEB’, Doug?”
Yeah, that’s the one I meant, although I’d been refraining from giving away the punchline.
Thank you for the extra Googlable terms, though, they helped me find it!
Somewhat embarrassingly, it’s on a webpage I had been looking at earlier while searching for it, just on the bottom half of it.
Punchline now redacted :-).