Reverse Turing Test

Reverse Turing Test

Random text generation offers an entertaining way to challenge the distinction between the babbler and the thinker. You can sometimes replicate something that can be mistaken for a literary discourse with a Monte Carlo generator but it is not possible randomly to construct a scientific one. Rhetoric can be constructed randomly, but not genuine scientific knowledge. This is the application of Turing’s test of artificial intelligence, except in reverse. What is the Turing test? The brilliant British mathematician, eccentric, and computer pioneer Alan Turing came up with the following test: A computer can be said to be intelligent if it can (on average) fool a human into mistaking it for another human. Here is the satirical reversal. A human can be said to be unintelligent if we can replicate his speech by a computer, which we know is unintelligent, and fool a human into believing that it was written by a human. Can one produce a piece of work that can be largely mistaken for Derrida entirely randomly?

The answer seems to be yes. Aside from the hoax by Alan Sokal, who managed to produce nonsense and get it published by some prominent journal, there are Monte Carlo generators designed to structure such texts and write entire papers. Fed with “postmodernist” texts, they can randomize phrases under a method called recursive grammar, and produce grammatically sound but entirely meaningless sentences that sound like Jacques Derrida, Camille Paglia, and such a crowd. Owing to the fuzziness of his thought, the literary intellectual can be fooled by randomness.

At the Monash University program in Australia featuring the Dada Engine built by Andrew C. Bulhak, I toyed with the engine and generated a few papers containing the following sentences:

However, the main theme of the works of Rushdie is not theory, as the dialectic paradigm of reality suggests, but pretheory. The premise of the neosemanticist paradigm of discourse implies that sexual identity, ironically, has significance.

Many narratives concerning the role of the writer as observer may be revealed. It could be said that if cultural narrative holds, we have to choose between the dialectic paradigm of narrative and neoconceptual Marxism. Sartre’s analysis of cultural narrative holds that society, paradoxically, has objective value.

Thus, the premise of the neodialectic paradigm of expression implies that consciousness may be used to reinforce hierarchy, but only if reality is distinct from consciousness; if that is not the case, we can assume that language has intrinsic meaning.

Some business speeches belong to this category in their own right, except that they are less elegant and draw on a different type of vocabulary than the literary ones. We can randomly construct a speech imitating that of your chief executive officer to ensure whether what he is saying has value, or if it is merely dressed-up nonsense from someone who was lucky to be put there. How? You select randomly five phrases below, then connect them by adding the minimum required to construct a grammatically sound speech.

• We look after our customer’s interests
• the road ahead
• our assets are our people
• creation of shareholder value
• our vision
• our expertise lies in
• we provide interactive solutions
• we position ourselves in this market
• how to serve our customers better
• short-term pain for long-term gain
• we will be rewarded in the long run
• we play from our strength and improve our weaknesses
• courage and determination will prevail
• we are committed to innovation and technology
• a happy employee is a productive employee
• commitment to excellence
• strategic plan
• our work ethics

If this bears too close a resemblance to the speech you just heard from the boss of your company, then I suggest looking for a new job.