The Graeme Game - background and how to play

Tony Curzon Price 30/11/24

The Graeme Game, which you can play over here, was imagined by my very dear friend Graeme. He said, on one of our walks, “When we have machines that pass the Turing test, we’ll need a reverse-Turing test, a set of questions that determine whether an interlocutor is human.” He went on to suggest that machines passing the Turing test would be a great moment for the scientific study of what makes humans human: we will have a non-human intelligence that passes, and yet we will know it is a non-human intelligence, and therefore we will be able to study thoroughly what such “passing” is. I wrote about the thinking behind the game over here.

And, a few moments later, we had together devised a game that could be used to study what it is to be human, and that is what I have now released as “the Graeme Game”. The general idea is that a human secret-holder is going to offer clues with the aim of having the human guess the secret before the machine does. The better we are at generating such clues, the closer we will be to understanding what makes us human as against the Turing-test passing machine.

My basic setup is as follows:

You need (at least) 2 humans to play. The first, call her Alice, reveals a secret to the game, as well as providing a first clue. She also specifies whether she wants to play “exact” or “fuzzy” matching.

When Alice presses “Start Game”, she gets taken to a new screen, whose URL she should share with the humans who are playing:

In the bottom left corner, you and anyone accessing the page can see the state of play.

Call the human guesser (there can be more than one) “Bob” - they can enter their name and a guess into the middle column. Any player can also, at any time, request a machine guess by clicking in the right hand column. Alice can add clues as she wishes in the left hand column.

The game history will update, and will be accessible to an LLM when anyone presses “Request Robot Guess”. The history is all that the LLM has, and it ought to be all that any human has.

I am storing games for future analysis - the point is to study what makes us human. But that means you should not enter anything into the game that you wouldn't want me to know.

Well… that is about it. I hope you enjoy it. Let me know how you get along.