The Turing Test

This hypothetical test, named after the English mathematician Alan Mathison Turing (1912 - 1954), is to clarify the question as to whether computers can think. Turing introduced it in an article in the journal Mind in 1950, where he called it the imitation game.

A person A and an interrogator in a different room engage in a dialogue by typing messages over  an electronic link. At some point A is replaced by intelligent software that simulates human responses. Turing argued that if the remaining human being is free to ask probing questions (such as ''Please write me a sonnet on the subject of the Forth Bridge'') but is unable to determine reliably whether the replies are generated by a human being or a computer, then the computer will have passed the test.




Working hard or hardly working?

 

Turing considered the question Can machines think? to be 'too meaningless to deserve discussion' and argued that his test, which replaces it, poses a more meaningful problem. But passing the Turing test came to be interpreted by many of his followers as amounting to being able to think. Some of the most sustained attacks on this approach have focused on the Chinese room argument.

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''Computers are incredibly fast, accurate and stupid; humans are incredibly slow, inaccurate and brilliant; together they are powerful beyond imagination''     ~ Albert Einstein