BL Feb 2020 to web

The Column
By Chuck Van Riper
The Turing Test
A
s many of us did, I grew up watching cartoons. A lot
of cartoons. And like many of us, I had my cartoon
crushes. Come on.. I know many of you did, too. I think
my first cartoon crush was Betty from the Flinstones. So,
how many of you grew up watching the Flinstones and
when Betty appeared, would think, “Wow, she’s pretty hot
considering she’s a bunch of pixels!” Go, ahead, you can
admit it, it’s totally normal. There’s even a name for it.
It’s called Schediaphilia, that’s when you have feelings or
romantic inclinations towards a cartoon character. It’s also
known as Toonophilia. Really! It’s true, and it’s very common.
So which were you? Betty or Whilma? Speaking of
Betty’s, was Betty or Veronica your crush in the Archie’s
cartoons. Again, gotta go with Betty. She could shake that
tambourine!
Of course, as resolutions got better and technology
got better, we saw the likes of Jasmine from Aladdin, Lois
from Family Guy, Leela from Futurama, and the oh, so unforgettable
Jessica Rabbit from Who Framed Roger Rabbit.
I was in my 30’s when that came out and still thought
“Now that’s a great bunch of pixels!” The thing about
Schediaphilia is the fantasy aspect. You can make it whatever
you want. It’s all up to you. You didn’t have to actually
interact with them in reality, but what if you could?
Would Veronica from the Archies really be that bitchy?
Would Ariel from the little Mermaid be so sweet?
In the early days of artificial intelligence, reacting to
a bunch of pixels and having them react back was a goal
to be accomplished. The advent of personal computers
and cell phones, I think, accelerated the process. Although
graphics technology was way behind, The interaction between
human and pixels had begun. In some early video
games, you could interact with pixels by typing on the
screen and the pixels would respond by typing something
back. Cool, but was it really interacting? Not really.
One of the fathers of artificial intelligence was Alan
Turing, whom I’ve previously written about. One of his
goals was to answer the question “Can computers think?”
This brings me back to memories of my first computer.
My brother gave it to me. He always used to say “Remember,
it’s you telling the computer what to do, not the other
way around.” Anyway, Turing wanted to make a program
22 - Brevard Live February 2020