This week we are learning about Artificial Intelligence. This includes Howard Gardner and the nine types of intelligence. We also learned about Alan Turing and The Turing Test. On Thursday we got to do our own version of The Turing Test where one of us goes outside with another computer and either we are the bot or respond to questions on our own while the class talks to us remotely then we take a vote on what each person is human or robot. We have been talking to different chat bots and even making some of our own!
Alan Turing, born on the 23rd of June 1912, Was an amazing mathmetition as a child who got introduced to cryptography by his friend Christpher Marcom. Marcom, who died in 1930 due to a chronic illness. was his best friend at the time when he was in school. When Turing finished school, he became a professor at a college. During WWII he was recruited by the government, with a bunch of other people, to work together to break the Enigma code. The Enigma code machine was the way Germany communicated with the military and seemed like an unbreakable code. Turing had to build a machine that could try many more answers to the code than a bunch of people could possibly try. It was a programmable computer. They succeeded and helped win the war. A few years later, the government found out Turing was gay and he was forced to either spend 2 years in prison or take horomone therapy. Which then took its toll on him. When he couldn't stand it any more he committed suicide on June 7th of 1954 by cyanide poisoning. A lot of Turing's work was classified for years. He received a pardon from Queen Elizabeth II in 2013.
During his lifetame, as well as all his other acomplishments, he created a test called The Turing Test. Which tested if a person was faced against an oponnnent who was either computer or humen, could they tell what they were talking to. Today this test is used by many programmers who make ChatBots. Which are software robots that are made to try and replicate human interactions. An award is given every year to whichever computer tricked the person to thinking it was human. We created our own ChatBots and did our own Turing Test in class. Some succeded and some failed. except our versin was also to see which human could replicate a computer best. It was very funny to see how it went.
A scene from the movie The Imitation Game about Alan Turing working on a machine to break the German Enigma code. I saw the movie. It was really interesting, but kind of sad.
War games is a 1983 science fiction film about the cold war. A kid named David Lightman who hacks computers in his own room. One day he tries to hack into the videogame company but ends up accidentaly hachin into a secret military computer. But what he sees is just a list of games. Once he starts to play a game on the list called Thermal Nuclear Warfare the computer starts to simulate and put into action what would normally be a game. This almost causes a full war and the way they fix it may suprise you.
On Friday we learned about Watson. Watson was the IBM super computer that played on Jeopardy. It was very hard for them to make the A.I. understand the questions they were asking.
We are also making Smart Games. These are things like "The Guessing Game," "Rock, Paper, Scissors," and "Tic Tac Toe". We are making all of these games. It has been hard. The guessing game was pretty easy but "Hangman" was very hard. Mainly because the computer needs to detect if a letter that the user puts in is in the word then displays it.
Our chatbot needs a little more work. Here is the source code:
We have completed "Rock Paper Scissors." Here is the output:
Next we will be trying to make a "Tic Tac Toe" game. The A.I. used will be very complicated because we will need to program strategy. Here is the output:
Hangman has been completed. We were able to add a big words list file to make it better. Here is the output:
We have completed Guessing Game "Pick a Number." Here is the output:
