The LAN that Professor Mei was going to use for the test was quickly assembled.

The computer network of four buildings within a radius of about three kilometers was connected, consisting of a total of 12 computer rooms, more than 100 servers and 3,000 computers. All the servers and terminals simulate the layout of a government office, three businesses, a commercial center, two schools, and a residential area, install a large number of applications, and import huge amounts of data.

The professor recruited 3,000 students from the school and asked them to sit in front of the computer to manually import and convert the data. For the first week, the entire network was connected to the Internet, and the professor allowed the students to do anything online, not even forbidding them to climb over walls and snoop on the dark web.

Aoki followed the professor to a large office area on the second floor of the laboratory building, where he saw about a hundred computers neatly arranged, like an Internet café. There are many young people who look like college students sitting in front of the computer, some are playing games, some are chatting QQ, some are watching videos, some are browsing the web, and of course, some people have opened some strange software and don't know what they are doing.

Walk through the large office area to a small room. It's not small, the room is very spacious, but the computer is a little less. Aoki counted them, and there were only nine.

"Is this the backbone of the entire network?" Aoki asked.

"You can say yes, you can say no." Mei Yiqiu smiled mysteriously, "For us, this is the most important place, through which we can monitor all the data of the entire local area network. But we can't control a single computer out there, let alone the eighty servers and more than two thousand computers spread across the other three buildings. ”

"Professor, can you disconnect from the internet now?" Mei Ziqing asked.

"Oh, let's have fun a little longer! Work after the internet outage is not as fun as it is now. Mei Yiqiu said, "Everyone knows what they want to do, right?" ”

"It should be very clear that all the process volunteers have in the document, except for the final test process in a sealed bag, which they are not allowed to open until the beginning." Mei Ziqing said.

"Well, that's good." The professor nodded and smiled at Aoki, "Let's eat here today, the whole test process may be quite long." ”

"Why don't you set a time?" Aoki asked.

"If the time is imposed, it will greatly reduce the accuracy of the Turing test. Oh yes, you know the Turing test, right? ”

Aoki said: "Yes, it is a method of testing artificial intelligence invented by Turing, the father of computers. Separate man and machine, let people ask questions to the machine, and after multiple tests, if more than 30% of people are not sure whether the person being tested is a human or a machine, then the machine passes the test and is considered to have human intelligence. ”

Mei Yiqiu said: "That's right, it's that simple. But there is a big limitation here, and that is time. When we set the test time, we put a shackle on the tester, which makes it easier for the machine to get by. ”

"Fooling around?"

"If you think about it this way, if machines had real intelligence, would they instinctively not want humans to know about it? It can be seen from the characteristics of human behavior that we are always willing to show off in front of the weak, and pretend to be crazy and stupid or even wag our tails and beg for mercy in front of the strong. If the machine is conscious, it will hide itself when it is not stronger than humans, and try not to let us discover its intelligence. ”

"Makes sense. But if you don't have a time limit, when do you plan to finish? ”

"Let those children decide for themselves, when he thinks he can end the game, I think people will always get bored before machines, but if it's a machine with intelligence, it's hard to say."

Mei Yiqiu's words were a bit unfathomable, and Aoki still didn't understand how to do a Turing test for a local area network, so he simply asked: "Professor, as far as I know, the current AI is based on algorithms, not hardware." The Turing test is ostensibly a machine, but it is essentially a test of the software, or program, that comes with the machine. You don't have any smart programs installed here, so who do you ask those testers to ask questions? ”

Mei Yiqiu replied: "The hardware in this LAN alone cannot support the AI operation with deep learning capabilities like Alphag, and if it is an ordinary applet, it is meaningless." And, what if you install an alphag? Like you said, the object of testing becomes a program, but alphag doesn't need us to test it. Our object is not a program, but a kind of neural network based on a hardware foundation. So, it's not about the program that matters, it's the structure and the mode of information delivery that matters. ”

"But the Turing test always asks questions, who do they ask?"

"We have dozens of different brands and models of terminal computers, and at least ten brands come with a smart assistant software, such as Microsoft's RTANA, Apple's Siri, etc., which are already very good smart programs that can be used to ask questions. And our rules allow testers to freely download what they think is the smartest software out there, which can also be installed from disk. Ziqing," Mei Yiqiu exclaimed, "How many programs have you downloaded now?" ”

"About twenty of them." Mei Ziqing replied.

"So much?" The professor seemed a little surprised, "It seems that we can't underestimate the creativity and unyielding spirit of young people!" ”

Mei Ziqing smiled: "Yes, I originally thought that they would all use the programs that come with big brands, because it is difficult to download smarter applications than Siri on the Internet." But they often think differently than we do, for example, some people think that the QQ chatbot is smarter than Microsoft's RTANA. ”

"Well, that's a good thing. The more fragmented it is, the more helpful it is for our results. Mei Yiqiu said.

"But isn't the object of such a test still software?" Aoki didn't quite understand.

Mei Yiqiu yawned and pulled her pipe out of her pocket.

"On the surface, it looks like this, but when you understand this LAN as a smart guy, you don't think like that." "You can think of it like a giant octopus, and all the computers here are the octopus's brachiopods." We know that the brachiopods of the octopus have independent nerve cords, and can complete independent simple judgments and behaviors without brain instructions, and the brain only needs to give very abstract instructions. ”

"There are similarities between computer networks and octopuses, where every computer, or every piece of software that we're going to test, has the ability to answer the tester's questions independently. But we know how intelligent these software are, and if they don't have a more powerful brain behind them, their answers won't be abnormal, and the test results can be imagined. ”

Mei Ziqing helped Mei to light the fire, and then added: "We have done tests on a relatively small scale before, and hundreds of people, without exception, think that it is a machine that answers their questions, not a human. In fact, this can be expected without experiments, because these software, whether it is Siri or RTANA, are supported by algorithms and big data, and they are not real artificial intelligence, and it is impossible to have any high-intelligence performance in the case of network disconnection. So the results of this test have long been expected. ”

"So what's the point of this test?"

"Anomaly!" Mei Yiqiu took a puff of cigarette and said, "If the result is abnormal, then can we understand that the brachiopods of these octopuses have received higher instructions?" ”