Toadies, Sycophants, and Lickspittles.

There's a particular cliché that seems to have become a fixture in adventure movies: the villain's cringing, cowardly sidekick, who licks his master's boots while abusing all below him.  These cardboard characters tend to suffer from bad dental hygiene and blemished skin, often provide comedic relief, and generally come to a bad end. In The Mummy, it's Beni, with his ambiguous accent and fez; in The Two Towers, it's Grimà Wormtongue, who comes to a much worse end in the book; and In The Battle of the Five Armies, the final segment of The Hobbit film trilogy, this character is Alfrid, flunky to the Master of Laketown.

Alfrid is thoroughly detestable. He abuses women and cripples, he sleeps on guard duty, he disguises himself as a crone to avoid fighting the orcs, and is despised by one and all.  Astonishingly, he seems to make a clean getaway at the end, sneering at the bravery of Bard the Bowman and escaping with his false bosom stuffed with gold to boot.

Seeing Alfrid march off triumphantly in the movie, it occurred to me that I'd like to see one of these one-dimensional toadies achieve redemption - can't we let one of them rise above themselves, just once?

At one point in The Battle of the Five Armies, orcs are overrunning the town of Dale, and every able-bodied man is locked in desperate combat except for Alfrid, who has concealed himself in an alcove to avoid discovery.   Exposed by circumstances, he is put in charge of the evacuation of the women, children and wounded by Bard, who presents him with a sword and sends him on his way.

Of course Alfrid ditches the weapon and pushes aside the weak and elderly to ensure his own safety, but let's imagine for a moment that the story went a bit differently.

There's a scene shortly afterwards where Bard sees his children menaced by a troll - Bard is a hundred feet away, and it's obvious that there's no possible way for him to reach his family in time to save them.  As in all of the Hobbit movies, the scriptwriter's solution is improbable physics, with Bard leaping onto a nearby cart and riding it down the street in a bouncing, unrealistic roller-coaster ride that eventually stops the troll in its tracks and saves the day.

But imagine that instead of Bard rescuing the children, Alfrid had just for one moment found his courage and taken action, used the sword he'd been given and attacked the troll.

I don't demand that he succeed, he only needs to distract and delay the monster long enough for Bard to save both the children and Alfrid. I don't want him to be killed, either.  All I want to see is that moment when he overcomes his cowardice, that moment when he realizes that he can be more than he is.

And on that basis, some less clichéd naming conventions would be a big help for these poor souls.  Imagine how differently Aragorn son of Arathorn would have been viewed if his name had been Alfrid Lickspittle.

- Sid

Artificial Intelligence II: We're Going to Trust You on This, Okay?

Any number of websites rely on some kind of system to determine whether or not they are being visited by actual humans as opposed to web bots of some sort, requiring users to type in numbers from a photo or answer a question about the Beatles.

These systems are called CAPTCHAs, which stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart - Alan Turing's Imitation Game flipped on its head, a filter to reveal primitive artificial intelligences rather than to prove consciousness.

However, the latest generation of CAPTCHA is completely different.  Apparently now they're willing to just take my word for it.

- Sid

Artificial Intelligence I: The Limitation Game.

I propose to consider the question, "Can machines think?" This should begin with definitions of the meaning of the terms "machine" and "think."

Alan Turing, Computing Machinery and Intelligence

On Christmas Eve, I attended an afternoon showing of The Imitation Game, the heavily fictionalized but well acted biopic regarding the life of Alan Turing, the noted mathematician, computer theorist and World War II cryptographer whose life ended in disgrace and presumed suicide following his arrest for homosexuality in 1952.*  As a science fiction fan, I was surprised by the title, which has nothing whatsoever to do with cryptography. "The Imitation Game" is a reference to what is more commonly known as the Turing Test, as detailed by Turing in his 1951 paper, Computing Machinery and Intelligence. 

For those of you unfamiliar with this touchstone of artificial intelligence theory, the Turing Test is very simple.  A judge sits in one room, and in two other rooms are a human being and a computer.  The human being and the computer can only communicate with the judge via text displayed on a computer screen. (I believe that in the original version, the questions and answers were paper based, but monitors and keyboards certainly speed things up.) It is the judge's job to decide which one of the communicants is the computer, based on their interaction.  It is the human's job to be a human, and the computer's job to imitate a human**.

Turing's simple experiment for establishing artificial intelligence is a standard reference for science fiction authors: there are Turing scales for degree of AI, Turing certifications, and more threateningly, William Gibson's Neuromancer introduces the idea of the Turing Police:  an international organization responsible for the elimination of unauthorized or rogue AIs.

Science fiction aside, real-world computers have miserably failed the Turing Test, as demonstrated by the annual Loebner Prize competition, originated by American inventor Hugh Loebner in 1990.  To date, no computer - or more accurately, no computer program -  has managed to win the $100,000 award by successfully convincing the judges of its humanity.  Several smaller prizes have been awarded to the best program, but so far it's really been to acknowledge the best of a poor lot.

However, it's an interesting conceit to demand that a computer convince someone that it's a human. Why should the ability to mimic humanity be a requirement for consciousness or sentience?

It's easy to say that artificial intelligence would need to be based on the human mind, what else do we have to use as a model?  On the other hand, there's no other area of technology that follows this path: cars run on wheels rather than mechanical legs, and cranes don't feature huge arms with hands and fingers to pick up cargo.  Technology has always been used to exceed the limitations of the human form rather than imitate them, and artificial intelligence might do well to take the same approach.

Maybe we need to come up with a new name for the game.

- Sid

*  At that point in time, homosexuality was a criminal offense in England.

** Based on the way that people react to tests, I actually suspect that in practice they both end up trying to imitate a human.