Kenneth Colby
Encyclopedia
Kenneth Mark Colby, M.D. (1920 to April 20, 2001) was an American psychiatrist
Psychiatrist
A psychiatrist is a physician who specializes in the diagnosis and treatment of mental disorders. All psychiatrists are trained in diagnostic evaluation and in psychotherapy...

 dedicated to the theory and application of computer science
Computer science
Computer science or computing science is the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and of practical techniques for their implementation and application in computer systems...

 and artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence is the intelligence of machines and the branch of computer science that aims to create it. AI textbooks define the field as "the study and design of intelligent agents" where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its...

 to psychiatry
Psychiatry
Psychiatry is the medical specialty devoted to the study and treatment of mental disorders. These mental disorders include various affective, behavioural, cognitive and perceptual abnormalities...

. Colby was a pioneer in the development of computer technology as a tool to try to understand cognitive functions and to assist both patients and doctors in the treatment process. He is perhaps best known for the development of a computer program called PARRY
PARRY
PARRY is, besides ELIZA, the other famous early chatterbot.-History:PARRY was written in 1972 by psychiatrist Kenneth Colby, then at Stanford University. While ELIZA was a tongue-in-cheek simulation of a Rogerian therapist, PARRY attempted to simulate a paranoid schizophrenic...

, which mimicked a paranoid schizophrenic and could "converse" with others. PARRY sparked serious debate about the possibility and nature of machine intelligence.

Early life and education

Colby was born in Waterbury
Waterbury
Waterbury is a city in Connecticut in the United States.Waterbury may also refer to any one of the following:-Places:United States*Waterbury, Nebraska*Waterbury, Vermont*Waterbury , Vermont,a village within the town of Waterbury, Vermont....

, Connecticut
Connecticut
Connecticut is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States. It is bordered by Rhode Island to the east, Massachusetts to the north, and the state of New York to the west and the south .Connecticut is named for the Connecticut River, the major U.S. river that approximately...

 in 1920. He graduated from Yale University
Yale University
Yale University is a private, Ivy League university located in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States...

 in 1941 and from Yale Medical School in 1943.

Career

Colby began his career in psychoanalysis
Psychoanalysis
Psychoanalysis is a psychological theory developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud. Psychoanalysis has expanded, been criticized and developed in different directions, mostly by some of Freud's former students, such as Alfred Adler and Carl Gustav...

 as a clinical associate at the San Francisco Institute of Psychoanalysis in 1951. During this time, he published A Primer for Psychotherapists, an introduction to psychodynamic psychotherapy
Psychotherapy
Psychotherapy is a general term referring to any form of therapeutic interaction or treatment contracted between a trained professional and a client or patient; family, couple or group...

. He joined the Department of Computer Science
Computer science
Computer science or computing science is the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and of practical techniques for their implementation and application in computer systems...

 at Stanford University
Stanford University
The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...

 in the early sixties, beginning his pioneering work in the relatively new field of artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence is the intelligence of machines and the branch of computer science that aims to create it. AI textbooks define the field as "the study and design of intelligent agents" where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its...

. In 1967 the National Institute of Mental Health
National Institute of Mental Health
The National Institute of Mental Health is one of 27 institutes and centers that make up the National Institutes of Health...

 recognized his research potential when he was awarded a Career Research Scientist Award. Colby came to UCLA as a professor of psychiatry
Psychiatry
Psychiatry is the medical specialty devoted to the study and treatment of mental disorders. These mental disorders include various affective, behavioural, cognitive and perceptual abnormalities...

 in 1974, and was jointly appointed professor in the Department of Computer Science a few years later. Over the course of his career, he wrote numerous books and articles on psychiatry, psychology, psychotherapy and artificial intelligence.

Psychoanalysis

Early in his career, in 1955, Colby published Energy and Structure in Psychoanalysis, an effort to bring Freud's basic doctrines into line with modern concepts of physics
Physics
Physics is a natural science that involves the study of matter and its motion through spacetime, along with related concepts such as energy and force. More broadly, it is the general analysis of nature, conducted in order to understand how the universe behaves.Physics is one of the oldest academic...

 and philosophy of science
Philosophy of science
The philosophy of science is concerned with the assumptions, foundations, methods and implications of science. It is also concerned with the use and merit of science and sometimes overlaps metaphysics and epistemology by exploring whether scientific results are actually a study of truth...

. This, however, would be one of the last attempts by Colby to reconcile psychoanalysis with what he saw as important developments in science and philosophical thought. Central to Freud's method is his employment of a hermeneutics of suspicion, a method of inquiry that refuses to take the subject at his or her word about internal processes. Freud sets forth explanations for a patient's mental state without regard for whether the patient agrees or not. If the patient does not agree, s/he has repressed the truth, that truth that the psychoanalyst alone can be entrusted with unfolding. The psychoanalyst's authority for deciding the nature or validity of a patient's state and the lack of empirical verifiability for making this decision was not acceptable to Colby.

Colby's disenchantment with psychoanalysis
Psychoanalysis
Psychoanalysis is a psychological theory developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud. Psychoanalysis has expanded, been criticized and developed in different directions, mostly by some of Freud's former students, such as Alfred Adler and Carl Gustav...

 would be further expressed in several publications, including his 1958 book, A Skeptical Psychoanalyst. He began to vigorously criticize psychoanalysis for failing to satisfy the most fundamental requirement of a science, that being the generation of reliable data. In his 1983 book, Fundamental Crisis in Psychiatry, he wrote, “Reports of clinical findings are mixtures of facts, fabulations, and fictives so intermingled that one cannot tell where one begins and the other leaves off. …we never know how the reports are connected to the events that actually happened in the treatment sessions, and so they fail to qualify as acceptable scientific data.”.

Likewise, in Cognitive Science and Psychoanalysis, he stated, "In arguing that psychoanalysis is not a science, we shall show that few scholars studying this question get to the bottom of the issue. Instead, they start by accepting, as do psychoanalytic theorists, that the reports of what happens in psychoanalytic treatment -- the primary source of the data -- are factual, and then they lay out their interpretations of the significance of facts for theory. We, on the other hand, question the status of the facts." These issues would shape his approach to psychiatry and guide his research efforts.

Computer Science

In the 1960s Colby began thinking about the ways in which computer theory and application could contribute to the understanding of brain function and mental illness
Mental illness
A mental disorder or mental illness is a psychological or behavioral pattern generally associated with subjective distress or disability that occurs in an individual, and which is not a part of normal development or culture. Such a disorder may consist of a combination of affective, behavioural,...

. One early project involved an Intelligent Speech Prosthesis
Prosthesis
In medicine, a prosthesis, prosthetic, or prosthetic limb is an artificial device extension that replaces a missing body part. It is part of the field of biomechatronics, the science of using mechanical devices with human muscle, skeleton, and nervous systems to assist or enhance motor control...

 which allowed individuals suffering from aphasia
Aphasia
Aphasia is an impairment of language ability. This class of language disorder ranges from having difficulty remembering words to being completely unable to speak, read, or write....

 to “speak” by helping them search for and articulate words using whatever phonemic or semantic clues they were able to generate.

Later, Colby would be one of the first to explore the possibilities of computer-assisted psychotherapy
Psychotherapy
Psychotherapy is a general term referring to any form of therapeutic interaction or treatment contracted between a trained professional and a client or patient; family, couple or group...

. In 1989, with his son Peter Colby, he formed the company Malibu Artificial Intelligence Works to develop and market a natural language
Natural language
In the philosophy of language, a natural language is any language which arises in an unpremeditated fashion as the result of the innate facility for language possessed by the human intellect. A natural language is typically used for communication, and may be spoken, signed, or written...

 version of cognitive behavioral therapy for depression, called Overcoming Depression. Overcoming Depression would go on to be used as a therapeutic learning program by the U.S. Navy and Department of Veteran Affairs
United States Department of Veterans Affairs
The United States Department of Veterans Affairs is a government-run military veteran benefit system with Cabinet-level status. It is the United States government’s second largest department, after the United States Department of Defense...

 and would be distributed to individuals who used it without supervision from a psychiatrist. Needless to say, this practice was challenged by the media. To one journalist Colby replied that the program could be better than human therapists because "After all, the computer doesn't burn out, look down on you or try to have sex with you."

Artificial Intelligence

In the 1960s at Stanford University, Colby embarked on the creation of software programs known as "chatterbots," which simulate conversations with people. One well known chatterbot
Chatterbot
A chatter robot, chatterbot, chatbot, or chat bot is a computer program designed to simulate an intelligent conversation with one or more human users via auditory or textual methods, primarily for engaging in small talk. The primary aim of such simulation has been to fool the user into thinking...

 at the time was ELIZA
ELIZA
ELIZA is a computer program and an early example of primitive natural language processing. ELIZA operated by processing users' responses to scripts, the most famous of which was DOCTOR, a simulation of a Rogerian psychotherapist. Using almost no information about human thought or emotion, DOCTOR...

, a computer program developed by Joseph Weizenbaum
Joseph Weizenbaum
Joseph Weizenbaum was a German-American author and professor emeritus of computer science at MIT.-Life and career:...

 in 1966 to parody a psychologist. ELIZA, by Weizenbaum's own admission, was developed more as a language-parsing tool than as an exercise in human intelligence. Named for the Eliza Doolittle character in "Pygmalion," it was the first conversational computer program, designed to imitate a psychotherapist asking questions instead of giving advice. It appeared to give conversational answers, although it could be led to lapse into obtuse nonsense.

In 1972, at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Colby built upon the idea of ELIZA to create a natural language program called PARRY that simulated the thinking of a paranoid
Paranoia
Paranoia [] is a thought process believed to be heavily influenced by anxiety or fear, often to the point of irrationality and delusion. Paranoid thinking typically includes persecutory beliefs, or beliefs of conspiracy concerning a perceived threat towards oneself...

 individual. This thinking entails the consistent misinterpretation of others' motives – others must be up to no good, they must have concealed motives that are dangerous, or their inquiries into certain areas must be deflected - which PARRY achieved via a complex system of assumptions, attributions, and “emotional responses” triggered by shifting weights assigned to verbal inputs.

PARRY: A Computer Model of Paranoia

Colby's aim in writing PARRY had been practical as well as theoretical. He thought of PARRY as a virtual reality teaching system for students before they were let loose on real patients. However, PARRY's design was driven by Colby's own theories about paranoia. Colby saw paranoia as a degenerate mode of processing symbols where the patient's remarks "are produced by an underlying organized structure of rules and not by a variety of random and unconnected mechanical failures." This underlying structure was an algorithm, not unlike a set of computer processes or procedures, which is accessible and can be reprogrammed, in other words "cured."

Shortly after it was introduced, PARRY would go on to create intense discussion and controversy over the possibility or nature of machine intelligence. PARRY was the first program to pass the “Turing Test
Turing test
The Turing test is a test of a machine's ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour. In Turing's original illustrative example, a human judge engages in a natural language conversation with a human and a machine designed to generate performance indistinguishable from that of a human being. All...

," named for the British mathematician Alan Turing
Alan Turing
Alan Mathison Turing, OBE, FRS , was an English mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst, and computer scientist. He was highly influential in the development of computer science, providing a formalisation of the concepts of "algorithm" and "computation" with the Turing machine, which played a...

, who in 1950 suggested that if a computer could successfully impersonate a human by carrying on a typed conversation with a person, it could be called intelligent. PARRY succeeded in passing this test when human interrogators, interacting with the program via remote keyboard, were unable with more than random accuracy to distinguish PARRY from an actual paranoid individual.

As philosopher D.C. Dennett stated in Alan Turing:Life and Legacy of a Great Thinker, "To my knowledge, the only serious and interesting attempt by any program designer to win even a severely modified Turing test has been Kenneth Colby. He had genuine psychiatrists interview PARRY. He did not suggest that they might be talking or typing to a computer; rather he made up some plausible story about why they were communicating with a real live patient via teletype. Then he took the PARRY transcript, inserted it into a group of teletype transcripts and gave them to another group of experts—more psychiatrists—and said, 'One of these was a conversation with a computer. Can you figure out which one it was?' They couldn't."

Much of the criticism of ELIZA as a model for artificial intelligence focused on the program's lack of an internal world model that influenced and tracked the conversation. PARRY simulates paranoid behavior by tracking its own internal emotional state on a few different dimensions. To illustrate this, Colby created another program called RANDOM-PARRY which chose responses at random. Responses from RANDOM-PARRY did not model the human patients' responses as well as standard PARRY. Some have argued that PARRY fooled its judges because paranoid behavior makes inappropriate responses or non sequiturs appropriate. But there is still a certain logic to them that PARRY simulates effectively. It is simpler to simulate paranoid behavior, perhaps, but it is not trivial.

The two computer programs, ELIZA and the paranoid PARRY, eventually met for series of "talks," executing different programs. One exchange such went like this:

PARRY: I know the mob controls the big rackets.

ELIZA: Who are you really talking about?

PARRY: Have you ever really thought about the Mafia?

ELIZA: Suppose you ever really thought about the Mafia?

PARRY: Let's talk about something else.

ELIZA: I am not sure I understand you fully.

PARRY: You keep asking me the same things, why not change the topic?

ELIZA: In what way?

Colby would claim that PARRY mimics the natural process by which a person (in this case a paranoid schizophrenic) engages in conversation. The structure of the program that makes the linguistic decisions in PARRY is isomorphic to the 'deep structure' of the mind of the paranoiac. As Colby stated: "Since we do not know the structure of the 'real' simulative processes used by the mind-brain, our posited structure stands as an imagined theoretical analogue, a possible and plausible organization of processes analogous to the unknown processes and serving as an attempt to explain their workings" .

Yet, some critics of PARRY expressed the concern that this computer program does not in actuality "understand" the way a person understands and continued to assert that the idiosyncratic, partial and idiolectic responses from PARRY cover up its limitations. Colby attempted to answer these and other criticisms in a 1974 publication entitled, "Ten Criticisms of PARRY."

Colby also raised his own ethical concerns over the application of his work to real life situations. In 1984, he wrote, "With the great amount of attention now being paid by the media to artificial intelligence, it would be naive, shortsighted, and even self-deceptive to think that there will not be public interest in scrutinizing, monitoring, regulating, and even constraining our efforts. What we do can affect people’s lives as they understand them. People are going to ask not only what we are doing but also whether it should be done. Some might feel we are meddling in areas best left alone. We should be prepared to participate in open discussion and debate on such ethical issues."

Still, PARRY has withstood the test of time and for many years has continued to be acknowledged by researchers in computer science for its apparent achievements. In a 1999 review of human-computer conversation, Yorick Wilks and Roberta Catizone from the University of Sheffield comment: "The best performance overall in HMC (Human-machine conversation) has almost certainly been Colby’s PARRY program since its release on the net around 1973. It was robust, never broke down, always had something to say and, because it was intended to model paranoid behaviour, its zanier misunderstandings could always be taken as further evidence of mental disturbance, rather than the processing failures they were."

Other Areas of Study

During his career, Colby ventured into other, more esoteric areas of research including classifying dreams in "primitive tribes." His findings suggested that men and women of primitive tribes differ in their dream life, these differences possibly contributing an empirical basis to our theoretical constructs of masculinity
Masculinity
Masculinity is possessing qualities or characteristics considered typical of or appropriate to a man. The term can be used to describe any human, animal or object that has the quality of being masculine...

 and femininity
Femininity
Femininity is a set of attributes, behaviors, and roles generally associated with girls and women. Though socially constructed, femininity is made up of both socially defined and biologically created factors...

.

Books

  • (1951) A Primer for Psychotherapists. (ISBN 978-0826020901)
  • (1955) Energy and Structure in Psychoanalysis.
  • (1957) An exchange of views on psychic energy and psychoanalysis.
  • (1958) A Skeptical Psychoanalyst.
  • (1960) Introduction to Psychoanalytic Research
  • (1973) Computer Models of Thought and Language.
  • (1975) Artificial Paranoia : A Computer Simulation of Paranoid Processes (ISBN 9780080181622)
  • (1983) Fundamental Crisis in Psychiatry: Unreliability of Diagnosis (ISBN 9780398047887)
  • (1988) Cognitive Science and Psychoanalysis (ISBN 9780805801774)
  • (1979) Secrets of a Grandpatzer: How to Beat Most People and Computers at Chess (ISBN 9784871878876)

Publications

  • "Sex Differences in Dreams of Primitive Tribes" American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 65, No. 5, Selected Papers in Method and Technique (Oct., 1963), pp. 1116-1122
  • "Computer Simulation of Change in Personal Belief Systems." Behavioral Science, 12 (1967), pp. 248-253
  • "Dialogues Between Humans and an Artificial Belief System." IJCAI (1969), pp. 319-324
  • "Experiments with a Search Algorithm for the Data Base of a Human Belief System." IJCAI (1969), pp. 649-654
  • "Artificial Paranoia." Artif. Intell. 2(1) (1971), pp. 1-25
  • "Turing-like Indistinguishability Tests for the Validation of a Computer Simulation of Paranoid Processes." Artif. Intell. 3(1-3) (1972), pp. 199-221
  • "Idiolectic Language-Analysis for Understanding Doctor-Patient Dialogues." IJCAI (1973), pp. 278-284
  • "Pattern-matching rules for the recognition of natural language dialogue expressions." Stanford University, Stanford, CA, 1974
  • "Appraisal of four psychological theories of paranoid phenomena." Journal of Abnormal Psychology. Vol 86(1) (1977), pp. 54-59
  • "Conversational Language Comprehension Using Integrated Pattern-Matching and Parsing." Artif. Intell. 9(2) (1977), pp. 111-134
  • "Cognitive therapy of paranoid conditions: Heuristic suggestions based on a computer simulation model." Journal Cognitive Therapy and Research Vol 3 (1) (March 1979)
  • "A Word-Finding Algorithm with a Dynamic Lexical-Semantic Memory for Patients with Anomia Using a Speech Prosthesis." AAAI (1980), pp. 289-291
  • "Reloading a Human Memory: A New Ethical Question for Artificial Intelligence Technology." AI Magazine 6(4) (1986), pp. 63-64

See also

  • Artificial Intelligence
    Artificial intelligence
    Artificial intelligence is the intelligence of machines and the branch of computer science that aims to create it. AI textbooks define the field as "the study and design of intelligent agents" where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its...

  • Chatterbot
    Chatterbot
    A chatter robot, chatterbot, chatbot, or chat bot is a computer program designed to simulate an intelligent conversation with one or more human users via auditory or textual methods, primarily for engaging in small talk. The primary aim of such simulation has been to fool the user into thinking...

  • Cognitive Science
    Cognitive science
    Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary scientific study of mind and its processes. It examines what cognition is, what it does and how it works. It includes research on how information is processed , represented, and transformed in behaviour, nervous system or machine...

  • ELIZA
    ELIZA
    ELIZA is a computer program and an early example of primitive natural language processing. ELIZA operated by processing users' responses to scripts, the most famous of which was DOCTOR, a simulation of a Rogerian psychotherapist. Using almost no information about human thought or emotion, DOCTOR...

  • natural language processing
    Natural language processing
    Natural language processing is a field of computer science and linguistics concerned with the interactions between computers and human languages; it began as a branch of artificial intelligence....

  • Psychoanalysis
    Psychoanalysis
    Psychoanalysis is a psychological theory developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud. Psychoanalysis has expanded, been criticized and developed in different directions, mostly by some of Freud's former students, such as Alfred Adler and Carl Gustav...

  • Turing Test
    Turing test
    The Turing test is a test of a machine's ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour. In Turing's original illustrative example, a human judge engages in a natural language conversation with a human and a machine designed to generate performance indistinguishable from that of a human being. All...


External links

  • http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9501E7DD1E3BF931A25756C0A9679C8B63
  • http://www.stanford.edu/group/SHR/4-2/text/dialogues.html
  • http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/senate/inmemoriam/KennethMarkColby.htm
  • http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/12/us/kenneth-colby-81-psychiatrist-expert-in-artificial-intelligence.html?pagewanted=1
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