KSET Exam 2016 Solved Paper

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Question Numbers: 55-60
Read the following passage carefully and answer the questions:
One of the favourite themes of science fiction writers is the fear that computers are beginning to overtake their creators in intelligence, memory and rationality. Soon, some fear, it will be impossible to distinguish between man and machine. In fact, in some areas of mental abilities, computers have already outstripped human capabilities. Computers can solve complicated arithmetical problems at a lightning speed, their memories are vaster and more accurate than human memories and so on. Are we about to reach a situation where we will be unable to distinguish between human beings and computers ?
Most humans seem to be complacent about their superiority because human beings can ‘think’ and computers cannot. Can this quality of ‘thinking’ be made into a fail-proof test to distinguish between humans and computers? This is the question that Alan Turing tried to answer in an article entitled ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence’, published in 1950. What the Turing Test relies on is the computer’s lack of consciousness, or the ability to think and comprehend. If, like Sherlock Holmes, the two were asked to decide which of the three students, the Indian, the athlete and the nervous one, had peered in through the six-foot high window of the examiner’s room to see the question papers before the examination, the human would easily make the connection between the height of the window and the likelihood of the athlete being the only one tall enough to be able to see through it. However, for the computer to make this ‘common sensical’ inference is quite difficult.
Two other areas which might show up the limitations of a computer’s mind are humour and moral consciousness. What would a computer do with a headline about the recently announced election results – ‘The Left is Right, and the Right is Left Out’ ? Here the human mind can easily decode the puns – the Leftist party and the concept of being ‘left out’ and Rightist party with the use of the word ‘right’ as the opposite of ‘wrong’. Thus the human mind would immediately be able to interpret this headline to mean that the Leftist party won the election, and the Rightist party was rejected by the voters. A computer would be more comfortable with statistical data.
Perhaps we humans can rest in our complacency until the time when a computer can make a joke or laugh at one.
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Question : 55
Total: 60
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