November 13, 2007
The Turing Test
The Turing test is a proposal for a test of a machine’s capability to demonstrate intelligence. Described by Alan Turing in the 1950 paper “Computing machinery and intelligence,” it proceeds as follows: a human judge engages in a natural language conversation with one human and one machine, each of which try to appear human; if the judge cannot reliably tell which is which, then the machine is said to pass the test. In order to keep the test setting simple and universal (to explicitly test the linguistic capability of the machine instead of its ability to render words into audio), the conversation is usually limited to a text-only channel such as a teletype machine as Turing suggested or, more recently, IRC or instant messaging.
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3 Responses to “The Turing Test”
Have you read Alan Turing: The Enigma by Andrew Hodges, first published in the mid-1980s? If you haven’t, get your hands on a copy. It is one of the best half-dozen biographies I have ever read. (And Hodges maintains a website devoted to Alan Turing that is both substantial and substantive.)
I haven’t. Thank you for the tip!
I work with many machines that go home at night and beat their wives and try to figure out how to cheat on their taxes and borrow their neighbors’ tools with no intention of returning them. I don’t think they are good at passing tests.