Forget the Turing Test, How about the Paula Abdul Test?

by Alphaville Herald on 01/05/05 at 9:20 pm

In an extremely interesting post on Terra Nova, Nathan Combs talks about scripting dance animations on second life. I’m never really sure what Nathan is saying, but his post contains speculation that the animations have an odd kind of community-forming function. He then speculates on the possibility more unpredictable dancers and wonders if one might have a turing-like test to see if an observer (fellow-dancer?) could deduce that another dancer was an AI. I think that was one of the points. It’s a cool idea and possibly more illuminating that the traditional Turing Test.

Here is one quote:

My scripts, as executed by my avatar, served to connect me to the other dancers and to the pulse of streamed music and hot hot hot pixels from those clubs. In the end it did not seem that the value of the dance was the dance per se, but was instead the textured community they helped to create.

and another:

what if the scripts were not so predictable? What if in their execution there a randomizing serendipity? Would this make them seem more alive? Perhaps variable timings, dynamic insertion of new moves, substitution of old moves… What if instead, the world required you to adopt the cloak of someone else’s creation. In this way there would be a freshness and novelty. Life-like? Say scripts had to be traded blindly before use? Would this make them more real?

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