The minimum intelligent signal test, or MIST, is a variation of the

Turing test The Turing test, originally called the imitation game by Alan Turing in 1949,. Turing wrote about the ‘imitation game’ centrally and extensively throughout his 1950 text, but apparently retired the term thereafter. He referred to ‘ iste ...

proposed by Chris McKinstry in which only boolean (yes/no or true/false) answers may be given to questions. The purpose of such a test is to provide a quantitative statistical measure of ''humanness'', which may subsequently be used to optimize the performance of

artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is the capability of computer, computational systems to perform tasks typically associated with human intelligence, such as learning, reasoning, problem-solving, perception, and decision-making. It is a field of re ...

systems intended to imitate human responses. McKinstry gathered approximately 80,000 propositions that could be answered yes or no, e.g.: * Is Earth a planet? * Was Abraham Lincoln once

President of the United States The president of the United States (POTUS) is the head of state and head of government of the United States. The president directs the Federal government of the United States#Executive branch, executive branch of the Federal government of t ...

? * Is the sun bigger than my foot? * Do people sometimes lie? He called these propositions

Mindpixel Mindpixel was a web-based collaborative artificial intelligence project which aimed to create a knowledgebase of millions of human validated true/false statements, or probabilistic propositions. It ran from 2000 to 2005. Description Participa ...

s. These questions test both specific knowledge of aspects of culture, and basic facts about the meaning of various words and concepts. It could therefore be compared with the

SAT The SAT ( ) is a standardized test widely used for college admissions in the United States. Since its debut in 1926, its name and Test score, scoring have changed several times. For much of its history, it was called the Scholastic Aptitude Test ...

intelligence test An intelligence quotient (IQ) is a total score derived from a set of standardized tests or subtests designed to assess human intelligence. Originally, IQ was a score obtained by dividing a person's mental age score, obtained by administering ...

ing and other controversial measures of mental ability. McKinstry's aim was not to distinguish between shades of intelligence but to identify whether a computer program could be considered intelligent at all. According to McKinstry, a program able to do much better than chance on a large number of MIST questions would be judged to have some level of intelligence and understanding. For example, on a 20-question test, if a program were guessing the answers at random, it could be expected to score 10 correct on average. But the

probability Probability is a branch of mathematics and statistics concerning events and numerical descriptions of how likely they are to occur. The probability of an event is a number between 0 and 1; the larger the probability, the more likely an e ...

of a program scoring 20 out of 20 correct by guesswork is only one in 2²⁰, i.e. one in 1,048,576; so if a program were able to sustain this level of performance over several independent trials, with no prior access to the propositions, it should be considered intelligent.

Discussion

McKinstry criticized existing approaches to

such as chatterbots, saying that his questions could "kill" AI programs by quickly exposing their weaknesses. He contrasted his approach, a series of direct questions assessing an AI's capabilities, to the Turing test and

Loebner Prize The Loebner Prize was an annual competition in artificial intelligence that awarded prizes to the computer programs considered by the judges to be the most human-like. The format of the competition was that of a standard Turing test. In each round ...

method of engaging an AI in undirected typed conversation. Critics{{who, date=May 2013 of the MIST have noted that it would be easy to "kill" a McKinstry-style AI too, due to the impossibility of supplying it with correct answers to all possible yes/no questions by ways of a

finite set In mathematics, particularly set theory, a finite set is a set that has a finite number of elements. Informally, a finite set is a set which one could in principle count and finish counting. For example, is a finite set with five elements. Th ...

of human-generated Mindpixels: the fact that an AI can answer the question "Is the sun bigger than my foot?" correctly does not mean that it can answer variations like "Is the sun bigger than (my hand , my liver , an egg yolk , Alpha Centauri A , ...)" correctly, too. However, the late McKinstry might have replied that a truly intelligent, knowledgeable entity (on a par with humans) would be able to work out answers such as (yes , yes , yes , don't know , ...) by applying its knowledge of the relative sizes of the objects named. In other words, the MIST was intended as a test of AI, not as a suggestion for implementing AI. It can also be argued that the MIST is a more

objective test Objective tests are measures in which responses maximize objectivity, in the sense that response options are structured such that examinees have only a limited set of options (e.g. Likert scale A Likert scale ( ,) is a psychometric scale named ...

of intelligence than the Turing test, a subjective assessment that some might consider to be more a measure of the interrogator's gullibility than of the machine's intelligence. According to this argument, a human's judgment of a Turing test is vulnerable to the

ELIZA effect In computer science, the ELIZA effect is a tendency to project human traits — such as experience, semantic comprehension or empathy — onto rudimentary computer programs having a textual interface. ELIZA was a symbolic AI chatbot developed in 1 ...

, a tendency to mistake superficial signs of intelligence for the real thing, anthropomorphizing the program. The response, suggested by

Alan Turing Alan Mathison Turing (; 23 June 1912 – 7 June 1954) was an English mathematician, computer scientist, logician, cryptanalyst, philosopher and theoretical biologist. He was highly influential in the development of theoretical computer ...

's essay ''

Computing Machinery and Intelligence "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" is a seminal paper written by Alan Turing on the topic of artificial intelligence. The paper, published in 1950 in ''Mind (journal), Mind'', was the first to introduce his concept of what is now known as th ...

'', is that if a program is a convincing imitation of an intelligent being, it is in fact intelligent. The dispute is thus over what it means for a program to have "real" intelligence, and by what signs it can be detected. A similar debate exists in the controversy over

great ape language Great ape language research historically involved attempts to teach chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans to communicate using imitative human speech, sign language, physical tokens and computerized lexigrams. These studies were con ...

, in which nonhuman primates are said to have learned some aspects of sign languages but the significance of this learning is disputed.

External links

''Minimum Intelligent Signal Test: An Alternative Turing Test''
Chris McKinstry, Canadian Artificial Intelligence #41
GAC-80kOpen source software for performing the Minimum Intelligent Signal Test
Turing tests Human–computer interaction