Blockhead
In plain wordsAn imagined machine that passes any conversation test by looking up prewritten replies in an unimaginably huge table. Most people judge it unintelligent, which suggests that behavior alone does not prove intelligence.
A hypothetical system, described by Ned Block, that gives sensible replies in any conversation of bounded length by looking them up in a gigantic table listing a reasonable continuation for every possible conversation history. Such a machine would pass the Turing testTuring test, n.: Alan Turing's proposed test of machine intelligence: a judge holds typed conversations with a hidden person and a hidden computer, and the computer passes if the judge cannot consistently pick it out., yet intuitively it is not intelligent, since all the intelligence lies with the programmers who wrote the table. Block concluded that intelligence depends on how behavior is produced, not only on what behavior is produced — a position he called psychologism, opposed to behaviorism. The argument recurs in debates over large language modelslarge language model, n.: A computer program trained on enormous amounts of text to predict the words that come next. At vast scale, that simple skill lets it chat, answer questions, translate, summarize and write code.: skeptics liken them to compressed lookup tables built from training text, while others reply that a model's parameters are vastly too few to store Blockhead's table, so it must generalize rather than retrieve.
Origin
Ned Block, 'Psychologism and Behaviorism' (Philosophical Review, 1981); later writers nicknamed the machine 'Blockhead'. Claude Shannon and John McCarthy had made a similar point about table-lookup machines and Turing-style tests in their preface to Automata Studies (1956).
Related
- Turing testTuring test, n.: Alan Turing's proposed test of machine intelligence: a judge holds typed conversations with a hidden person and a hidden computer, and the computer passes if the judge cannot consistently pick it out.
- Chinese roomChinese room, n.: A thought experiment: a person who knows no Chinese follows a rulebook to answer Chinese messages so well that outsiders think they understand. If the person doesn't understand, does a computer running a program?
- machine understandingmachine understanding, n.: Whether, and in what sense, an AI system grasps what words, situations or problems mean — rather than just producing answers that look as though it does.
- memorizationmemorization, n.: When an AI model stores specific pieces of its training data — a paragraph, a phone number, an image — closely enough to reproduce them, instead of only learning general patterns.
- problem of other mindsproblem of other minds, n.: The puzzle of how we can know that anyone besides ourselves has thoughts and feelings, since we only ever see their behavior. AI turns this old puzzle into a practical one.
- Turing testTuring test, n.: Alan Turing's proposed test of machine intelligence: a judge holds typed conversations with a hidden person and a hidden computer, and the computer passes if the judge cannot consistently pick it out.
Sources
- Block, N. (1981). Psychologism and Behaviorism. The Philosophical Review 90(1), 5–43.
Mentioned in
Chinese roomChinese room, n.: A thought experiment: a person who knows no Chinese follows a rulebook to answer Chinese messages so well that outsiders think they understand. If the person doesn't understand, does a computer running a program?, functionalismfunctionalism, n.: The view that minds are defined by how they work, not what they are made of: pain, for example, is whatever inner state plays pain's part, linking injury, other thoughts and behavior., behaviorismbehaviorism, n.: The view that the mind should be studied, or even defined, only through observable behavior rather than inner thoughts or feelings. It shapes debates about whether AI that acts intelligently really is intelligent., Ned BlockNed Block, prop. n.: An American philosopher who distinguished felt experience from information available for thinking, and who imagined a lookup-table machine to show that passing a conversation test need not mean intelligence.