turing test

The "implied code" is a mental model of the operational logic of an interactive work. We might describe this as a kind of interior map in the mind of the interactive user, a private cartography created while wandering the territory of the code. In hypertext fiction, representations of the corpus of the text through "maps" (e.g. a garden, quilt, or body) have played with the disjunction between the map and the territory of node-link navigation. In interactive fiction (IF), map-making both an authoring and user engagement strategy is a tradition that stretches back to the foundation of the genre in 1970s speleunking. Later, paratextual maps of various kinds were often bundled with 1980s corporate works. The tensions between these authorial, descriptive maps and user-created, experiential maps (both mental and physical) are still explored in today's contemporary IF. Like the implied human in Turing's test, these implied psychogeographic landscapes are often not what they appear, however this artifice is one fundamental aspect of their art electronic literature.

The chatbot, or conversational agent, is a new media art object that has been around since Joseph Weizenbaum's ELIZA (1966), which is included in ELO's directory of e-lit. These programs have since been adapted for electronic narratives and interactive dramas. Instigating this area of research, Alan Turing's thought experiment/dare, the Turing Test (1950), claimed that computers would soon be able to perform conversational exchange convincingly as humans. While many use the Turing Test to contextualize a discussion about chatbots, few have examined the origins of the Turing Test itself. Crossing the history of technology in this vision of a chatbot legacy, I will outline one new theory of the origins of the Turing Test, suggesting a lineage from the military-industrial complex that helps us to re-examine our interaction with artificial agents in electronic literature from IF works such as Emily Short's "Galatea" to Andrew Stern and Michael Mateas' "Facade."

Sandy Baldwin's presentation theorizes the rhythms and flows of the logging field as cognitive activities of the virtual subject. He describes a psychoanalytics and poetics of login, first in the protocols of unix .cshrc and .login files, as well as machine logs. These primary site of net inscription intensify and wane. They must be fed: you must login. The iterative inscription of the subject deepens the signifiers of login into buccal organs of incorporation. The second part of his paper focuses on Captcha software, which combines repeated Turing tests with enormous amounts of text production, all put to work in the background as the largest distributed OCR project in the world. Finally, he examines artists using login to produce work, with examples from Alan Sondheim, Noemata, and Mouchette.

(Author's abstract from the 2008 ELO Conference)