After using the ‘random’ comic link several times on XKCD, I found one about the Turing test. When I was an IB DP student some people though that some of my essays were written by computer programs (I have heard similar opinions on nearly every text which I have translated from English to Polish). So if an essay written by a human may not pass the Turing test, may a text written by a computer be considered useful for us?
This is obviously true for most texts, if all textual program output is considered a text. So a stricter definition of text is needed to make this question useful. A standard essay for an English writing exam might be appropriate, since they clearly express several useful criteria, like having interestingly complicated grammar use and discombobulating message with clearly visible personal involvement.
It is clearly difficult to describe an essay in an algorithm. Although clear description of ideas is one of the largest problems in essay-writing, a program converting a trivial description of reasoning into an essay would be useful. Essays involve many examples which should not be the same in every student’s work, so a large database of facts could be used to add examples for some theses.
So with a given message, the essay would be written with many encyclopedic examples and as complicated grammatical structure as foreseen by the authors of the program. From grammar point of view, it is nearly impossible to map an English sentence to an abstract thought representation, but the reverse process, which would be used in the program, would be simple. A problem would occur when the generated sentence has other meanings unknown to the computer, but it is a problem also for human students.
It could be interesting how a program would represent all facts which could be used in an essay. Humans use large collections of useful facts written in the English or equivalent language (formally, languages are not isomorphic due to the Sapir-Whorf’s hypothesis, but all popular languages have the same drawback for this use). Therefore to write it is necessary to read which is too difficult for computers.
Maybe with a formal notation for facts useful in essays and a formal description of an essay, a computer would be able to write a highly marked essay. But I do not believe that for a human it would be simpler to write such program and its data than to write a good essay. (I hope that a computer will quote a part of this blog entry in an essay and explain an opposite point of view.)
