Page 131 - 49A Field Guide to Genetic Programming

12.3 Human Competitive Results – the Humies 117

Figure 12.1: Elvis sitting with its right hand outstretched. The apparent
position and size of a bright red laser attached to its finger tip is recorded
(see Table 12.1). The data are then used to train a GP to move the robot’s
arm to a spot in three dimensions using only its eyes.

12.3 Human Competitive Results:
The Humies

Getting machines to produce human-like results is the very reason for the
existence of the fields of artificial intelligence and machine learning. How-
ever, it has always been very difficult to assess how much progress these
fields have made towards their ultimate goal. Alan Turing understood that
in order to avoid human biases when assessing machine intelligence, machine
behaviour must be evaluated objectively. This led him to propose an imi-
tation game, now known as the Turing test (Turing, 1950). Unfortunately,
the Turing test is not usable in practice, and so, there is a need for more
workable objective tests of machine intelligence.
Koza, Bennett, and Stiffelman (1999) suggested shifting attention from
the notion of intelligence to the notion of human competitiveness. A result
cannot acquire the rating of “human competitive” merely because it is en-
dorsed by researchers inside the specialised fields that are attempting to
create machine intelligence. A result produced by an automated method