b) It just got lucky… which proves nothing, because if you are lucky enough, you can pass the Turing test without the lookup table, just by sending random bits to the output.
In this case the game of ‘find the intelligence’ traces back through the random algorithm and to the person who selected the overwhelmingly improbable random outcome out of the set of possible random outcomes. That is, the algorithm that has produced apparently conscious output and can be said to result in a pass in the Turing Test is any algorithm that can take the string “imagine that you have a random bitstring that happens to look like it is conscious” and create imaginary bitstrings that instantiate that.
b) It just got lucky… which proves nothing, because if you are lucky enough, you can pass the Turing test without the lookup table, just by sending random bits to the output.
It ‘proves nothing’ in the same way that all of science has proved nothing. “If we are lucky enough” every experimental test we have done to conclude that gravity exists could have resulted from a physics where mass is constantly accelerated in random directions. If so, let’s hope that our luck keeps holding...
Demonstrating that something is overwhelmingly likely is, indeed, a different thing than proving that something has probability zero. But it is still rather useful information.
In this case the game of ‘find the intelligence’ traces back through the random algorithm and to the person who selected the overwhelmingly improbable random outcome out of the set of possible random outcomes. That is, the algorithm that has produced apparently conscious output and can be said to result in a pass in the Turing Test is any algorithm that can take the string “imagine that you have a random bitstring that happens to look like it is conscious” and create imaginary bitstrings that instantiate that.
It ‘proves nothing’ in the same way that all of science has proved nothing. “If we are lucky enough” every experimental test we have done to conclude that gravity exists could have resulted from a physics where mass is constantly accelerated in random directions. If so, let’s hope that our luck keeps holding...
Demonstrating that something is overwhelmingly likely is, indeed, a different thing than proving that something has probability zero. But it is still rather useful information.