Turing test - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

The Turing test is a test of a machine

Machine

A machine manages power to accomplish a task, examples include, a mechanical system, a computing system, an electronic system, and a molecular machine. In common usage, the meaning is that of a device having parts that perform or assist in performing any type of work...

's ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour. In Turing's original illustrative example, a human judge engages in a natural language conversation

Conversation

Conversation is a form of interactive, spontaneous communication between two or more people who are following rules of etiquette.Conversation analysis is a branch of sociology which studies the structure and organization of human interaction, with a more specific focus on conversational...

with a human

Human

Humans are the only living species in the Homo genus...

and a machine designed to generate performance indistinguishable from that of a human being. All participants are separated from one another. If the judge cannot reliably tell the machine from the human, the machine is said to have passed the test. The test does not check the ability to give the correct answer, it checks how closely the answer resembles typical human answers. The conversation is limited to a text-only channel such as a computer keyboard

Keyboard (computing)

In computing, a keyboard is a typewriter-style keyboard, which uses an arrangement of buttons or keys, to act as mechanical levers or electronic switches...

and screen so that the result is not dependent on the machine's ability to render words into audio.

The test was introduced by 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...

in his 1950 paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence
Computing machinery and intelligence
Computing Machinery and Intelligence, written by Alan Turing and published in 1950 in Mind, is a seminal paper on the topic of artificial intelligence in which the concept of what is now known as the Turing test was introduced to a wide audience....

, which opens with the words: "I propose to consider the question, 'Can machines think?'" Since "thinking" is difficult to define, Turing chooses to "replace the question by another, which is closely related to it and is expressed in relatively unambiguous words." Turing's new question is: "Are there imaginable digital computers which would do well in the imitation game?" This question, Turing believed, is one that can actually be answered. In the remainder of the paper, he argued against all the major objections to the proposition that "machines can think".

In the years since 1950, the test has proven to be both highly influential and widely criticized, and it is an essential concept in the philosophy of artificial intelligence

Philosophy of artificial intelligence

The philosophy of artificial intelligence attempts to answer such questions as:* Can a machine act intelligently? Can it solve any problem that a person would solve by thinking?...

Philosophical background

The question of whether it is possible for machines to think has a long history, which is firmly entrenched in the distinction between dualist

Dualism (philosophy of mind)

In philosophy of mind, dualism is a set of views about the relationship between mind and matter, which begins with the claim that mental phenomena are, in some respects, non-physical....

and materialist

Materialism

In philosophy, the theory of materialism holds that the only thing that exists is matter; that all things are composed of material and all phenomena are the result of material interactions. In other words, matter is the only substance...

views of the mind. According to dualism, the mind

Mind

The concept of mind is understood in many different ways by many different traditions, ranging from panpsychism and animism to traditional and organized religious views, as well as secular and materialist philosophies. Most agree that minds are constituted by conscious experience and intelligent...

is non-physical

Non-physical entity

A non-physical entity is an entity that lacks a physical or material body or material or physical characteristics. Non-physical entities may be considered hypothetical, e.g...

(or, at the very least, has non-physical properties

Property dualism

Property dualism describes a category of positions in the philosophy of mind which hold that, although the world is constituted of just one kind of substance - the physical kind - there exist two distinct kinds of properties: physical properties and mental properties...

) and, therefore, cannot be explained in purely physical terms. According to materialism, the mind can be explained physically, which leaves open the possibility of minds that are produced artificially .

In 1936, philosopher Alfred Ayer

Alfred Ayer

Sir Alfred Jules "Freddie" Ayer was a British philosopher known for his promotion of logical positivism, particularly in his books Language, Truth, and Logic and The Problem of Knowledge ....

considered the standard philosophical question of other minds: how do we know that other people have the same conscious experiences that we do? In his book Language, Truth and Logic Ayer suggested a protocol to distinguish between a conscious man and an unconscious machine: "The only ground I can have for asserting that an object which appears to be conscious is not really a conscious being, but only a dummy or a machine, is that it fails to satisfy one of the empirical tests by which the presence or absence of consciousness is determined." (This suggestion is very similar to the Turing test, but it is not certain that Ayer's popular philosophical classic was familiar to Turing.)

Alan Turing

Researchers in the United Kingdom

United Kingdom

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...

had been exploring "machine intelligence" for up to ten years prior to the founding of the field of AI

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...

research in 1956. It was a common topic among the members of the Ratio Club

Ratio Club

The Ratio Club was a small informal dining club of young psychologists, physiologists, mathematicians and engineers who met to discuss issues in cybernetics....

who were an informal group of British cybernetics

Cybernetics

Cybernetics is the interdisciplinary study of the structure of regulatory systems. Cybernetics is closely related to information theory, control theory and systems theory, at least in its first-order form...

and electronics

Electronics

Electronics is the branch of science, engineering and technology that deals with electrical circuits involving active electrical components such as vacuum tubes, transistors, diodes and integrated circuits, and associated passive interconnection technologies...

researchers that included Alan Turing

Alan Turing

, after whom the test is named.

Turing, in particular, had been tackling the notion of machine intelligence since at least 1941 and one of the earliest-known mentions of "computer intelligence" was made by him in 1947. In Turing's report, "Intelligent Machinery", he investigated "the question of whether or not it is possible for machinery to show intelligent behaviour" and, as part of that investigation, proposed what may be considered the forerunner to his later tests:

It is not difficult to devise a paper machine which will play a not very bad game of chess. Now get three men as subjects for the experiment. A, B and C. A and C are to be rather poor chess players, B is the operator who works the paper machine. ... Two rooms are used with some arrangement for communicating moves, and a game is played between C and either A or the paper machine. C may find it quite difficult to tell which he is playing.

"Computing Machinery and Intelligence

Computing machinery and intelligence

Computing Machinery and Intelligence, written by Alan Turing and published in 1950 in Mind, is a seminal paper on the topic of artificial intelligence in which the concept of what is now known as the Turing test was introduced to a wide audience....

" (Turing) was the first published paper by Turing to focus exclusively on the machine intelligence. Turing begins the 1950 paper with the claim "I propose to consider the question 'Can machines think?'" As he highlights, the traditional approach to such a question is to start with definition

Definition

A definition is a passage that explains the meaning of a term , or a type of thing. The term to be defined is the definiendum. A term may have many different senses or meanings...

s, defining both the terms "machine" and "intelligence". Turing chooses not to do so; instead he replaces the question with a new one, "which is closely related to it and is expressed in relatively unambiguous words." In essence he proposes to change the question from "Do machines think?" to "Can machines do what we (as thinking entities) can do?" The advantage of the new question, Turing argues, is that it draws "a fairly sharp line between the physical and intellectual capacities of a man."

To demonstrate this approach Turing proposes a test inspired by a party game

Party game

Party games are games that some people play as forms of entertainment at social gatherings. Party games usually involve more than one player. There are a large number and styles of party games available and the one selected will depend on the atmosphere that is sought to be generated...

, known as the "Imitation Game", in which a man and a woman go into separate rooms and guests try to tell them apart by writing a series of questions and reading the typewritten answers sent back. In this game both the man and the woman aim to convince the guests that they are the other. (Huma Shah argues that this two-human version of the game was presented by Turing only to introduce the reader to the machine-human question-answer test.) Turing described his new version of the game as follows:

We now ask the question, "What will happen when a machine takes the part of A in this game?" Will the interrogator decide wrongly as often when the game is played like this as he does when the game is played between a man and a woman? These questions replace our original, "Can machines think?"

Later in the paper Turing suggests an "equivalent" alternative formulation involving a judge conversing only with a computer and a man. While neither of these formulations precisely matches the version of the Turing Test that is more generally known today, he proposed a third in 1952. In this version, which Turing discussed in a BBC

BBC

The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...

radio broadcast, a jury asks questions of a computer and the role of the computer is to make a significant proportion of the jury believe that it is really a man.

Turing's paper considered nine putative objections, which include all the major arguments against artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence

that have been raised in the years since the paper was published. (See Computing Machinery and Intelligence
Computing machinery and intelligence
Computing Machinery and Intelligence, written by Alan Turing and published in 1950 in Mind, is a seminal paper on the topic of artificial intelligence in which the concept of what is now known as the Turing test was introduced to a wide audience....

.)

ELIZA and PARRY

In 1966, Joseph Weizenbaum

Joseph Weizenbaum

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

created a program which appeared to pass the Turing test. The program, known as 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...

, worked by examining a user's typed comments for keywords. If a keyword is found, a rule that transforms the user's comments is applied, and the resulting sentence is returned. If a keyword is not found, ELIZA responds either with a generic riposte or by repeating one of the earlier comments. In addition, Weizenbaum developed ELIZA to replicate the behaviour of a Rogerian psychotherapist

Person-centered psychotherapy

Person-centered therapy is also known as person-centered psychotherapy, person-centered counseling, client-centered therapy and Rogerian psychotherapy. PCT is a form of talk-psychotherapy developed by psychologist Carl Rogers in the 1940s and 1950s...

, allowing ELIZA to be "free to assume the pose of knowing almost nothing of the real world." With these techniques, Weizenbaum's program was able to fool some people into believing that they were talking to a real person, with some subjects being "very hard to convince that ELIZA [...] is not human." Thus, ELIZA is claimed by some to be one of the programs (perhaps the first) able to pass the Turing Test, although this view is highly contentious (see below).

Kenneth Colby

Kenneth Colby

Kenneth Mark Colby, M.D. was an American psychiatrist dedicated to the theory and application of computer science and artificial intelligence to psychiatry. Colby was a pioneer in the development of computer technology as a tool to try to understand cognitive functions and to assist both patients...

created 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...

in 1972, a program described as "ELIZA with attitude". It attempted to model the behaviour 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...

schizophrenic, using a similar (if more advanced) approach to that employed by Weizenbaum. In order to validate the work, PARRY was tested in the early 1970s using a variation of the Turing Test. A group of experienced psychiatrists analysed a combination of real patients and computers running PARRY through teleprinter

Teleprinter

A teleprinter is a electromechanical typewriter that can be used to communicate typed messages from point to point and point to multipoint over a variety of communication channels that range from a simple electrical connection, such as a pair of wires, to the use of radio and microwave as the...

s. Another group of 33 psychiatrists were shown transcripts of the conversations. The two groups were then asked to identify which of the "patients" were human and which were computer programs. The psychiatrists were able to make the correct identification only 48 per cent of the time — a figure consistent with random guessing.

In the 21st century, versions of these programs (now known as "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...

s") continue to fool people. "CyberLover", a malware

Malware

Malware, short for malicious software, consists of programming that is designed to disrupt or deny operation, gather information that leads to loss of privacy or exploitation, or gain unauthorized access to system resources, or that otherwise exhibits abusive behavior...

program, preys on Internet users by convincing them to "reveal information about their identities or to lead them to visit a web site that will deliver malicious content to their computers". The program has emerged as a "Valentine-risk" flirting with people "seeking relationships online in order to collect their personal data".

The Chinese room

John Searle

John Rogers Searle is an American philosopher and currently the Slusser Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley.-Biography:...

's 1980 paper Minds, Brains, and Programs proposed an argument against the Turing Test known as the "Chinese room

Chinese room

The Chinese room is a thought experiment by John Searle, which first appeared in his paper "Minds, Brains, and Programs", published in Behavioral and Brain Sciences in 1980...

" thought experiment. Searle argued that software (such as ELIZA) could pass the Turing Test simply by manipulating symbols of which they had no understanding. Without understanding, they could not be described as "thinking" in the same sense people do. Therefore—Searle concludes—the Turing Test cannot prove that a machine can think. Searle's argument has been widely criticized, but it has been endorsed as well.

Arguments such as that proposed by Searle and others working on the philosophy of mind

Philosophy of mind

Philosophy of mind is a branch of philosophy that studies the nature of the mind, mental events, mental functions, mental properties, consciousness and their relationship to the physical body, particularly the brain. The mind-body problem, i.e...

sparked off a more intense debate about the nature of intelligence, the possibility of intelligent machines and the value of the Turing test that continued through the 1980s and 1990s.

Loebner Prize

The Loebner Prize provides an annual platform for practical Turing Tests with the first competition held in November, 1991. It is underwritten by Hugh Loebner

Hugh Loebner

Hugh Loebner is notable as the sponsor of the Loebner Prize, an embodiment of the Turing test. He is an American inventor, holding six United States Patents. He is also an outspoken social activist for the decriminalization of prostitution.- Loebner prize:Loebner established the Loebner Prize in...

; the Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies in Massachusetts

Massachusetts

The Commonwealth of Massachusetts is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States of America. It is bordered by Rhode Island and Connecticut to the south, New York to the west, and Vermont and New Hampshire to the north; at its east lies the Atlantic Ocean. As of the 2010...

, United States

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

organized the Prizes up to and including the 2003 contest. As Loebner described it, one reason the competition was created is to advance the state of AI research, at least in part, because no one had taken steps to implement the Turing Test despite 40 years of discussing it.

The first Loebner Prize competition in 1991 led to a renewed discussion of the viability of the Turing Test and the value of pursuing it, in both the popular press and in academia. The first contest was won by a mindless program with no identifiable intelligence that managed to fool naive interrogators into making the wrong identification. This highlighted several of the shortcomings of Turing test (discussed below): The winner won, at least in part, because it was able to "imitate human typing errors"; the unsophisticated interrogators were easily fooled; and some researchers in AI have been led to feel that the test is merely a distraction from more fruitful research.

The silver (text only) and gold (audio and visual) prizes have never been won. However, the competition has awarded the bronze medal every year for the computer system that, in the judges' opinions, demonstrates the "most human" conversational behavior among that year's entries. Artificial Linguistic Internet Computer Entity

Artificial Linguistic Internet Computer Entity

A.L.I.C.E. , also referred to as Alicebot, or simply Alice, is a natural language processing chatterbot—a program that engages in a conversation with a human by applying some heuristical pattern matching rules to the human's input, and in its online form it also relies on a hidden third person...

(A.L.I.C.E.) has won the bronze award on three occasions in recent times (2000, 2001, 2004). Learning AI Jabberwacky

Jabberwacky

Jabberwacky is a chatterbot created by British programmer Rollo Carpenter. Its stated aim is to "simulate natural human chat in an interesting, entertaining and humorous manner"...

won in 2005 and 2006.

The Loebner Prize tests conversational intelligence; winners are typically chatterbot

Chatterbot

programs, or Artificial Conversational Entities (ACE)s. Early Loebner Prize rules restricted conversations: Each entry and hidden-human conversed on a single topic, thus the interrogators were restricted to one line of questioning per entity interaction. The restricted conversation rule was lifted for the 1995 Loebner Prize. Interaction duration between judge and entity has varied in Loebner Prizes. In Loebner 2003, at the University of Surrey, each interrogator was allowed five minutes to interact with an entity, machine or hidden-human. Between 2004 and 2007, the interaction time allowed in Loebner Prizes was more than twenty minutes. In 2008, the interrogation duration allowed was five minutes per pair, because the organiser, Kevin Warwick

Kevin Warwick

Kevin Warwick is a British scientist and professor of cybernetics at the University of Reading, Reading, Berkshire, United Kingdom...

, and coordinator, Huma Shah, consider this to be the duration for any test, as Turing stated in his 1950 paper: " ... making the right identification after five minutes of questioning". They felt Loebner's longer test, implemented in Loebner Prizes 2006 and 2007, was inappropriate for the state of artificial conversation technology. It is ironic that the 2008 winning entry, Elbot

Elbot

Elbot is a chatterbot created by Fred Roberts.At the 18th Loebner Prize for artificial intelligence, held on the weekend of 11–12 October 2008, Elbot convinced three of the 12 human interrogators he was indistinguishable from human, beating the other contestants and taking the Bronze Prize.If Elbot...

, does not mimic a human; its personality is that of a robot, yet Elbot deceived three human judges that it was the human during human-parallel comparisons.

During the 2009 competition, held in Brighton, UK, the communication program restricted judges to 10 minutes for each round, 5 minutes to converse with the human, 5 minutes to converse with the program. This was to test the alternative reading of Turing's prediction that the 5-minute interaction was to be with the computer. For the 2010 competition, the Sponsor has again increased the interaction time, between interrogator and system, to 25 minutes.

Versions of the Turing test

Saul Traiger argues that there are at least three primary versions of the Turing test, two of which are offered in "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" and one that he describes as the "Standard Interpretation." While there is some debate regarding whether the "Standard Interpretation" is that described by Turing or, instead, based on a misreading of his paper, these three versions are not regarded as equivalent, and their strengths and weaknesses are distinct.

Huma Shah points out that Turing himself was concerned with whether a machine could think and was providing a simple method to examine this: through human-machine question-answer sessions. Shah argues there is one imitation game which Turing described could be practicalised in two different ways: a) one-to-one interrogator-machine test, and b) simultaneous comparison of a machine with a human, both questioned in parallel by an interrogator. Since the Turing test is a test of indistinguishability in performance capacity, the verbal version generalizes naturally to all of human performance capacity, verbal as well as nonverbal (robotic).

The Imitation Game

Turing's original game, as we have seen, described a simple party game involving three players. Player A is a man, player B is a woman and player C (who plays the role of the interrogator) is of either sex. In the Imitation Game, player C is unable to see either player A or player B, and can communicate with them only through written notes. By asking questions of player A and player B, player C tries to determine which of the two is the man and which is the woman. Player A's role is to trick the interrogator into making the wrong decision, while player B attempts to assist the interrogator in making the right one.

Sterret refers to this as the "Original Imitation Game Test", Turing proposes that the role of player A be filled by a computer. Thus, the computer's task is to pretend to be a woman and attempt to trick the interrogator into making an incorrect evaluation. The success of the computer is determined by comparing the outcome of the game when player A is a computer against the outcome when player A is a man. If, as Turing puts it, "the interrogator decide[s] wrongly as often when the game is played [with the computer] as he does when the game is played between a man and a woman", it may be argued that the computer is intelligent.

The second version appears later in Turing's 1950 paper. As with the Original Imitation Game Test, the role of player A is performed by a computer, the difference being that the role of player B is now to be performed by a man rather than a woman.

"Let us fix our attention on one particular digital computer C. Is it true that by modifying this computer to have an adequate storage, suitably increasing its speed of action, and providing it with an appropriate programme, C can be made to play satisfactorily the part of A in the imitation game, the part of B being taken by a man?"

In this version, both player A (the computer) and player B are trying to trick the interrogator into making an incorrect decision.

The standard interpretation

Common understanding has it that the purpose of the Turing Test is not specifically to determine whether a computer is able to fool an interrogator into believing that it is a human, but rather whether a computer could imitate a human. While there is some dispute whether this interpretation was intended by Turing — Sterrett believes that it was and thus conflates the second version with this one, while others, such as Traiger, do not — this has nevertheless led to what can be viewed as the "standard interpretation." In this version, player A is a computer and player B a person of either sex. The role of the interrogator is not to determine which is male and which is female, but which is a computer and which is a human. The fundamental issue with the standard interpretation is that the interrogator cannot differentiate which responder is human, and which is machine. There are issues about duration, but the standard interpretation generally considers this limitation as something that should be reasonable.

Imitation Game vs. Standard Turing Test

Controversy has arisen over which of the alternative formulations of the test Turing intended. Sterrett argues that two distinct tests can be extracted from his 1950 paper and that, pace Turing's remark, they are not equivalent. The test that employs the party game and compares frequencies of success is referred to as the "Original Imitation Game Test," whereas the test consisting of a human judge conversing with a human and a machine is referred to as the "Standard Turing Test," noting that Sterrett equates this with the "standard interpretation" rather than the second version of the imitation game. Sterrett agrees that the Standard Turing Test (STT) has the problems that its critics cite but feels that, in contrast, the Original Imitation Game Test (OIG Test) so defined is immune to many of them, due to a crucial difference: Unlike the STT, it does not make similarity to human performance the criterion, even though it employs human performance in setting a criterion for machine intelligence. A man can fail the OIG Test, but it is argued that it is a virtue of a test of intelligence that failure indicates a lack of resourcefulness: The OIG Test requires the resourcefulness associated with intelligence and not merely "simulation of human conversational behaviour." The general structure of the OIG Test could even be used with non-verbal versions of imitation games.

Still other writers have interpreted Turing as proposing that the imitation game itself is the test, without specifying how to take into account Turing's statement that the test that he proposed using the party version of the imitation game is based upon a criterion of comparative frequency of success in that imitation game, rather than a capacity to succeed at one round of the game.

Saygin has suggested that maybe the original game is a way of proposing a less biased experimental design as it hides the participation of the computer. The imitation game also includes a "social hack" not found in the standard interpretation, as in the game both computer and male human are required to play as pretending to be someone they are not.

Should the interrogator know about the computer?

A crucial piece of any laboratory test is that there should be a control. Turing never makes clear whether the interrogator in his tests is aware that one of the participants is a computer. However if there was a machine that did have the potential to pass a Turing test, it would be safe to assume a double blind control would be necessary.

To return to the Original Imitation Game, he states only that player A is to be replaced with a machine, not that player C is to be made aware of this replacement. When Colby, FD Hilf, S Weber and AD Kramer tested PARRY, they did so by assuming that the interrogators did not need to know that one or more of those being interviewed was a computer during the interrogation. As Ayse Saygin, Peter Swirski, and others have highlighted, this makes a big difference to the implementation and outcome of the test. an experimental study looking at Gricean maxim violations using transcripts of Loebner's one-to-one (interrogator-hidden interlocutor) Prize for AI contests between 1994–1999, Ayse Saygin found significant differences between the responses of participants who knew and did not know about computers being involved.

Huma Shah and Kevin Warwick

Kevin Warwick

Kevin Warwick is a British scientist and professor of cybernetics at the University of Reading, Reading, Berkshire, United Kingdom...

, who organised the 2008 Loebner Prize

Loebner prize

The Loebner Prize is an annual competition in artificial intelligence that awards prizes to the chatterbot considered by the judges to be the most human-like. The format of the competition is that of a standard Turing test. In each round, a human judge simultaneously holds textual conversations...

at Reading University which staged simultaneous comparison tests (one judge-two hidden interlocutors), showed that knowing/not knowing did not make a significant difference in some judges' determination. Judges were not explicitly told about the nature of the pairs of hidden interlocutors they would interrogate. Judges were able to distinguish human from machine, including when they were faced with control pairs of two humans and two machines embedded among the machine-human set ups. Spelling errors gave away the hidden-humans; machines were identified by 'speed of response' and lengthier utterances.

Tractability and simplicity

The power and appeal of the Turing test derives from its simplicity. The philosophy of mind

Philosophy of mind

, psychology

Psychology

Psychology is the study of the mind and behavior. Its immediate goal is to understand individuals and groups by both establishing general principles and researching specific cases. For many, the ultimate goal of psychology is to benefit society...

, and modern neuroscience

Neuroscience

Neuroscience is the scientific study of the nervous system. Traditionally, neuroscience has been seen as a branch of biology. However, it is currently an interdisciplinary science that collaborates with other fields such as chemistry, computer science, engineering, linguistics, mathematics,...

have been unable to provide definitions of "intelligence" and "thinking" that are sufficiently precise and general to be applied to machines. Without such definitions, the central questions of the philosophy of artificial intelligence

Philosophy of artificial intelligence

The philosophy of artificial intelligence attempts to answer such questions as:* Can a machine act intelligently? Can it solve any problem that a person would solve by thinking?...

cannot be answered. The Turing test, even if imperfect, at least provides something that can actually be measured. As such, it is a pragmatic solution to a difficult philosophical question.

Breadth of subject matter

The format of the test allows the interrogator to give the machine a wide variety of intellectual tasks. Turing wrote that "the question and answer method seems to be suitable for introducing almost any one of the fields of human endeavor that we wish to include." John Haugeland

John Haugeland

John Haugeland was a professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago from 1999 until his death. He was chair of the philosophy department from 2004-2007. He spent at most of his career teaching at the University of Pittsburgh...

adds that "understanding the words is not enough; you have to understand the topic as well."

In order to pass a well-designed Turing test, the machine must use natural language

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....

, reason

Commonsense reasoning

Commonsense reasoning is the branch of Artificial intelligence concerned with replicating human thinking. There are several components to this problem, including:* Developing adequately broad and deep commonsense knowledge bases....

, have knowledge

Knowledge representation

Knowledge representation is an area of artificial intelligence research aimed at representing knowledge in symbols to facilitate inferencing from those knowledge elements, creating new elements of knowledge...

and learn

Machine learning

Machine learning, a branch of artificial intelligence, is a scientific discipline concerned with the design and development of algorithms that allow computers to evolve behaviors based on empirical data, such as from sensor data or databases...

. The test can be extended to include video input, as well as a "hatch" through which objects can be passed: this would force the machine to demonstrate the skill of vision

Computer vision

Computer vision is a field that includes methods for acquiring, processing, analysing, and understanding images and, in general, high-dimensional data from the real world in order to produce numerical or symbolic information, e.g., in the forms of decisions...

and robotics

Robotics

Robotics is the branch of technology that deals with the design, construction, operation, structural disposition, manufacture and application of robots...

as well. Together, these represent almost all of the major problems that artificial intelligence research would like to solve.

The Feigenbaum test is designed to take advantage of the broad range of topics available to a Turing test. It is a limited form of Turing's question-answer game which compares the machine against the abilities of experts in specific fields such as literature

Literature

Literature is the art of written works, and is not bound to published sources...

or chemistry

Chemistry

Chemistry is the science of matter, especially its chemical reactions, but also its composition, structure and properties. Chemistry is concerned with atoms and their interactions with other atoms, and particularly with the properties of chemical bonds....

. IBM

IBM

International Business Machines Corporation or IBM is an American multinational technology and consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, New York, United States. IBM manufactures and sells computer hardware and software, and it offers infrastructure, hosting and consulting services in areas...

's Watson

Watson (artificial intelligence software)

Watson is an artificial intelligence computer system capable of answering questions posed in natural language, developed in IBM's DeepQA project by a research team led by principal investigator David Ferrucci. Watson was named after IBM's first president, Thomas J...

machine achieved success in a man vs machine television quiz show of human knowledge, Jeopardy!

Jeopardy!

Griffin's first conception of the game used a board comprising ten categories with ten clues each, but after finding that this board could not be shown on camera easily, he reduced it to two rounds of thirty clues each, with five clues in each of six categories...

Weaknesses of the test

The Turing test can be used as a measure of a machine's ability to think only if one assumes that an interrogator can determine if a machine is thinking by comparing its behaviour with human behaviour. Every element of this assumption has been questioned: the reliability of the interrogator's judgement, the value of comparing only behaviour and the value of comparing it to a human. Because of these and other considerations, some AI researchers have questioned the usefulness of the test.

Turing himself did not explicitly state that the Turing test could be used as a measure of intelligence, or any other human quality. He wanted to provide a clear and understandable alternative to the word "think", which he could then use to reply to criticisms of the possibility of "thinking machines" and to suggest ways that research might move forward.

Human intelligence vs intelligence in general

The Turing test does not directly test whether the computer behaves intelligently - it tests only whether the computer behaves like a human being. Since human behavior and intelligent behavior are not exactly the same thing, the test can fail to accurately measure intelligence in two ways:

Some human behavior is unintelligent: The Turing test requires that the machine be able to execute all human behaviors, regardless of whether they are intelligent. It even tests for behaviors that we may not consider intelligent at all, such as the susceptibility to insults, the temptation to lie

Lie

For other uses, see Lie A lie is a type of deception in the form of an untruthful statement, especially with the intention to deceive others....

or, simply, a high frequency of typing mistakes

Typographical error

A typographical error is a mistake made in, originally, the manual type-setting of printed material, or more recently, the typing process. The term includes errors due to mechanical failure or slips of the hand or finger, but usually excludes errors of ignorance, such as spelling errors...

. If a machine cannot imitate these unintelligent behaviors in detail it fails the test.

This objection was raised by The Economist
The Economist
The Economist is an English-language weekly news and international affairs publication owned by The Economist Newspaper Ltd. and edited in offices in the City of Westminster, London, England. Continuous publication began under founder James Wilson in September 1843...

, in an article entitled "Artificial Stupidity

Artificial stupidity

Artificial Stupidity is commonly used as a humorous opposite of the term artificial intelligence , often as a derogatory reference to the inability of an AI program to adequately perform basic tasks...

" published shortly after the first Loebner prize competition in 1992. The article noted that the first Loebner winner's victory was due, at least in part, to its ability to "imitate human typing errors." Turing himself had suggested that programs add errors into their output, so as to be better "players" of the game.

If the human foil does not share the same information as the interrogator they could be misclassified as a machine.

Some intelligent behavior is inhuman: The Turing test does not test for highly intelligent behaviors, such as the ability to solve difficult problems or come up with original insights. In fact, it specifically requires deception on the part of the machine: if the machine is more intelligent than a human being it must deliberately avoid appearing too intelligent. If it were to solve a computational problem that is impossible for any human to solve, then the interrogator would know the program is not human, and the machine would fail the test.

Because it cannot measure intelligence that is beyond the ability of humans, the test cannot be used in order to build or evaluate systems that are more intelligent than humans. Because of this, several test alternatives that would be able to evaluate superintelligent systems have been proposed.

Real intelligence vs simulated intelligence

The Turing test is concerned strictly with how the subject acts — the external behaviour of the machine. In this regard, it takes a behaviourist or functionalist

Functionalism (philosophy of mind)

Functionalism is a theory of the mind in contemporary philosophy, developed largely as an alternative to both the identity theory of mind and behaviourism. Its core idea is that mental states are constituted solely by their functional role — that is, they are causal relations to other mental...

approach to the study of intelligence. The example of ELIZA

ELIZA

suggests that a machine passing the test may be able to simulate human conversational behavior by following a simple (but large) list of mechanical rules, without thinking or having a mind at all.

John Searle

John Searle

John Rogers Searle is an American philosopher and currently the Slusser Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley.-Biography:...

has argued that external behavior cannot be used to determine if a machine is "actually" thinking or merely "simulating thinking." His chinese room

Chinese room

The Chinese room is a thought experiment by John Searle, which first appeared in his paper "Minds, Brains, and Programs", published in Behavioral and Brain Sciences in 1980...

argument is intended to show that, even if the Turing test is a good operational definition of intelligence, it may not indicate that the machine has a mind

Mind

, consciousness

Consciousness

Consciousness is a term that refers to the relationship between the mind and the world with which it interacts. It has been defined as: subjectivity, awareness, the ability to experience or to feel, wakefulness, having a sense of selfhood, and the executive control system of the mind...

, or intentionality

Intentionality

The term intentionality was introduced by Jeremy Bentham as a principle of utility in his doctrine of consciousness for the purpose of distinguishing acts that are intentional and acts that are not...

. (Intentionality is a philosophical term for the power of thoughts to be "about" something.)

Turing anticipated this line of criticism in his original paper, writing that:
Turing asked his readers: if the machine could respond in a sustained and satisfactory way to any question put to it by an interrogator who was not an expert about the machine's inner workings, then would this be described as "an easy contrivance"?

Naivete of interrogators and the anthropomorphic fallacy

In practice, the test's results can easily be dominated not by the computer's intelligence, but by the attitudes, skill or naiveté of the questioner.

Turing does not specify the precise skills and knowledge required by the interrogator in his description of the test, but he did use the term "average interrogator": "[the] average interrogator would not have more than 70 per cent chance of making the right identification after five minutes of questioning".

show that experts are fooled, and that interrogator strategy, "power" vs "solidarity" affects correct identification, the latter being more successful.

Chatterbot programs such as ELIZA have repeatedly fooled unsuspecting people into believing that they are communicating with human beings. In these cases, the "interrogator" is not even aware of the possibility that they are interacting with a computer. To successfully appear human, there is no need for the machine to have any intelligence whatsoever and only a superficial resemblance to human behaviour is required.

Early Loebner prize competitions used "unsophisticated" interrogators who were easily fooled by the machines. Since 2004, the Loebner Prize organizers have deployed philosophers, computer scientists, and journalists among the interrogators. Nonetheless, some of these experts have been deceived by the machines.

Michael Shermer

Michael Shermer

Michael Brant Shermer is an American science writer, historian of science, founder of The Skeptics Society, and Editor in Chief of its magazine Skeptic, which is largely devoted to investigating pseudoscientific and supernatural claims. The Skeptics Society currently has over 55,000 members...

points out that human beings consistently choose to consider non-human objects as human whenever they are allowed the chance, a mistake called the anthropomorphic fallacy: They talk to their cars, ascribe desire and intentions to natural forces (e.g., "nature abhors a vacuum"), and worship the sun as a human-like being with intelligence. If the Turing test is applied to religious objects, Shermer argues, then, that inanimate statues, rocks, and places have consistently passed the test throughout history. This human tendency towards anthropomorphism effectively lowers the bar for the Turing test, unless interrogators are specifically trained to avoid it.

Impracticality and irrelevance: the Turing test and AI research

Mainstream AI researchers argue that trying to pass the Turing Test is merely a distraction from more fruitful research. Indeed, the Turing test is not an active focus of much academic or commercial effort—as Stuart Russell

Stuart J. Russell

Stuart Russell is a computer scientist known for his contributions to artificial intelligence.Stuart Russell was born in Portsmouth, England. He received his Bachelor of Arts degree with first-class honours in Physics from Wadham College, Oxford in 1982, and his Ph.D. in Computer Science from...

and Peter Norvig

Peter Norvig

Peter Norvig is an American computer scientist. He is currently the Director of Research at Google Inc.-Educational Background:...

write: "AI researchers have devoted little attention to passing the Turing test." There are several reasons.

First, there are easier ways to test their programs. Most current research in AI-related fields is aimed at modest and specific goals, such as automated scheduling

Automated planning and scheduling

Automated planning and scheduling is a branch of artificial intelligence that concerns the realization of strategies or action sequences, typically for execution by intelligent agents, autonomous robots and unmanned vehicles. Unlike classical control and classification problems, the solutions are...

, object recognition

Object recognition

Object recognition in computer vision is the task of finding a given object in an image or video sequence. Humans recognize a multitude of objects in images with little effort, despite the fact that the image of the objects may vary somewhat in different view points, in many different sizes / scale...

, or logistics

Logistics

Logistics is the management of the flow of goods between the point of origin and the point of destination in order to meet the requirements of customers or corporations. Logistics involves the integration of information, transportation, inventory, warehousing, material handling, and packaging, and...

. In order to test the intelligence of the programs that solve these problems, AI researchers simply give them the task directly, rather than going through the roundabout method of posing the question in a chat room

Chat room

The term chat room, or chatroom, is primarily used by mass media to describe any form of synchronous conferencing, occasionally even asynchronous conferencing...

populated with computers and people.

Second, creating life-like simulations of human beings is a difficult problem on its own that does not need to be solved to achieve the basic goals of AI research. Believable human characters may be interesting in a work of art, a game, or a sophisticated user interface

User interface

The user interface, in the industrial design field of human–machine interaction, is the space where interaction between humans and machines occurs. The goal of interaction between a human and a machine at the user interface is effective operation and control of the machine, and feedback from the...

, but they are not part of the science of creating intelligent machines, that is, machines that solve problems using intelligence. Russell and Norvig suggest an analogy with the history of flight: Planes are tested by how well they fly, not by comparing them to birds. "Aeronautical engineering

Aeronautics

Aeronautics is the science involved with the study, design, and manufacturing of airflight-capable machines, or the techniques of operating aircraft and rocketry within the atmosphere...

texts," they write, "do not define the goal of their field as 'making machines that fly so exactly like pigeons that they can fool other pigeons.'"

Turing, for his part, never intended his test to be used as a practical, day-to-day measure of the intelligence of AI programs; he wanted to provide a clear and understandable example to aid in the discussion of the philosophy of artificial intelligence

Philosophy of artificial intelligence

The philosophy of artificial intelligence attempts to answer such questions as:* Can a machine act intelligently? Can it solve any problem that a person would solve by thinking?...

. John McCarthy

John McCarthy (computer scientist)

John McCarthy was an American computer scientist and cognitive scientist. He coined the term "artificial intelligence" , invented the Lisp programming language and was highly influential in the early development of AI.McCarthy also influenced other areas of computing such as time sharing systems...

observes that the philosophy of AI is "unlikely to have any more effect on the practice of AI research than philosophy of science generally has on the practice of science."

Variations of the Turing test

Numerous other versions of the Turing test, including those expounded above, have been mooted through the years.

Reverse Turing test and CAPTCHA

A modification of the Turing test wherein the objective of one or more of the roles have been reversed between machines and humans is termed a reverse Turing test. An example is implied in the work of psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion

Wilfred Bion

Wilfred Ruprecht Bion DSO was an influential British psychoanalyst, who became president of the British Psychoanalytical Society from 1962 to 1965....

, who was particularly fascinated by the "storm" that resulted from the encounter of one mind by another. In his 2000 book, among several other original points with regard to the Turing test, literary scholar Peter Swirski

Peter Swirski

Peter Swirski is a Canadian scholar and literary critic listed in Canadian Who's Who. Specialist in American literature and American Studies, he is the author of twelve books, including the National Book Award nominated Ars Americana, Ars Politica and the staple of popular culture studies From...

discussed in detail the idea of what he termed the Swirski test--essentially the reverse Turing test. He pointed out that it overcomes most if not all standard objections levelled at the standard version.

Carrying this idea forward, R. D. Hinshelwood

R. D. Hinshelwood

Robert D Hinshelwood is Professor of Psychoanalytic Studies at the University of Essex in England. He has written numerous books and papers on the subject of Psychoanalysis, as well as on its history, and has a particular interest in group dynamics....

described the mind as a "mind recognizing apparatus." The challenge would be for the computer to be able to determine if it were interacting with a human or another computer. This is an extension of the original question that Turing attempted answer but would, perhaps, offer a high enough standard to define a machine that could "think" in a way that we typically define as characteristically human.

CAPTCHA

CAPTCHA

A CAPTCHA is a type of challenge-response test used in computing as an attempt to ensure that the response is generated by a person. The process usually involves one computer asking a user to complete a simple test which the computer is able to generate and grade...

is a form of reverse Turing test. Before being allowed to perform some action on a website

Website

A website, also written as Web site, web site, or simply site, is a collection of related web pages containing images, videos or other digital assets. A website is hosted on at least one web server, accessible via a network such as the Internet or a private local area network through an Internet...

, the user is presented with alphanumerical characters in a distorted graphic image and asked to type them out. This is intended to prevent automated systems from being used to abuse the site. The rationale is that software sufficiently sophisticated to read and reproduce the distorted image accurately does not exist (or is not available to the average user), so any system able to do so is likely to be a human.

Software that can reverse CAPTCHA with some accuracy by analyzing patterns in the generating engine is being actively developed.
OCR or optical character recognition is also under development as a workaround for CAPTCHA.

Subject matter expert Turing test

Another variation is described as the subject matter expert

Subject Matter Expert

A subject matter expert or domain expert is a person who is an expert in a particular area or topic. When spoken, sometimes the acronym "SME" is spelled out and other times voiced as a word ....

Turing test, where a machine's response cannot be distinguished from an expert in a given field. This is also known as a "Feigenbaum test" and was proposed by Edward Feigenbaum

Edward Feigenbaum

Edward Albert Feigenbaum is a computer scientist working in the field of artificial intelligence. He is often called the "father of expert systems."...

in a 2003 paper.

Total Turing test

The "Total Turing test" variation of the Turing test adds two further requirements to the traditional Turing test. The interrogator can also test the perceptual abilities of the subject (requiring Computer vision

Computer vision

) and the subject’s ability to manipulate objects (requiring Robotics

Robotics

Robotics is the branch of technology that deals with the design, construction, operation, structural disposition, manufacture and application of robots...

)..

Minimum Intelligent Signal Test

The Minimum Intelligent Signal Test, proposed by Chris McKinstry

Chris McKinstry

Kenneth Christopher McKinstry was a researcher in artificial intelligence. He led the development of the MISTIC project which was launched in May 1996. He founded the Mindpixel project in July 2000, and closed it in December 2005...

, is another variation of Turing's test, where only binary responses (true/false or yes/no) are permitted. It is typically used to gather statistical data against which the performance of artificial intelligence programs may be measured.

Hutter Prize

The organizers of the Hutter Prize

Hutter Prize

The Hutter Prize is a cash prize funded by Marcus Hutter which rewards data compression improvements on a specific 100 MB English text file. Specifically, the prize awards 500 euros for each one percent improvement in the compressed size of the file enwik8, which is the smaller of two files used...

believe that compressing natural language text is a hard AI problem, equivalent to passing the Turing test.

The data compression test has some advantages over most versions and variations of a Turing test, including:

It gives a single number that can be directly used to compare which of two machines is "more intelligent."
It does not require the computer to lie to the judge

The main disadvantages of using data compression as a test are:

It is not possible to test humans this way.
It is unknown what particular "score" on this test—if any—is equivalent to passing a human-level Turing test.

Other tests based on compression or Kolmogorov Complexity

A related approach to Hutter's prize which appeared much earlier in the late 1990s is the inclusion of compression problems in an extended Turing Test. Other related tests in this line are presented by Henandez-Orallo and Dowe.
Two major advantages of some of these tests are their applicability to nonhuman intelligences and their absence of a requirement for human testers.

Ebert test

The Turing test inspired the Ebert test

Ebert test

The Ebert test is a test to gauge whether a computer-based synthesized voice can tell a joke with sufficient skill to cause people to laugh. It was proposed by film critic Roger Ebert at the 2011 TED conference as a challenge to software developers to have a computerized voice master the...

proposed in 2011 by film critic Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert

Roger Joseph Ebert is an American film critic and screenwriter. He is the first film critic to win a Pulitzer Prize for Criticism.Ebert is known for his film review column and for the television programs Sneak Previews, At the Movies with Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, and Siskel and Ebert and The...

which is a test whether a computer-based synthesized voice

Speech synthesis

Speech synthesis is the artificial production of human speech. A computer system used for this purpose is called a speech synthesizer, and can be implemented in software or hardware...

has sufficient skill in terms of intonations, inflections, timing and so forth, to make people laugh.

Predictions

Turing predicted that machines would eventually be able to pass the test; in fact, he estimated that by the year 2000, machines with 10⁹ bit

Bit

A bit is the basic unit of information in computing and telecommunications; it is the amount of information stored by a digital device or other physical system that exists in one of two possible distinct states...

s (about 119.2 MiB

Mebibyte

The mebibyte is a multiple of the unit byte for digital information. The binary prefix mebi means 220, therefore 1 mebibyte is . The unit symbol for the mebibyte is MiB. The unit was established by the International Electrotechnical Commission in 2000 and has been accepted for use by all major...

or approximately 120 megabyte

Megabyte

The megabyte is a multiple of the unit byte for digital information storage or transmission with two different values depending on context: bytes generally for computer memory; and one million bytes generally for computer storage. The IEEE Standards Board has decided that "Mega will mean 1 000...

s) of memory would be able to fool thirty percent of human judges in a five-minute test. He also predicted that people would then no longer consider the phrase "thinking machine" contradictory. He further predicted that machine learning

Machine learning

would be an important part of building powerful machines, a claim considered plausible by contemporary researchers in artificial intelligence.

In a 2008 paper submitted to 19th Midwest Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science Conference, Dr. Shane T. Mueller predicted a modified Turing Test called a "Cognitive Decathlon" could be accomplished within 5 years.

By extrapolating an exponential growth of technology over several decades, futurist

Futurology

Futures studies is the study of postulating possible, probable, and preferable futures and the worldviews and myths that underlie them. There is a debate as to whether this discipline is an art or science. In general, it can be considered as a branch under the more general scope of the field of...

Ray Kurzweil predicted that Turing test-capable computers would be manufactured in the near future. In 1990, he set the year around 2020. By 2005, he had revised his estimate to 2029.

The Long Bet Project is a wager of $

United States dollar

The United States dollar , also referred to as the American dollar, is the official currency of the United States of America. It is divided into 100 smaller units called cents or pennies....

20,000 between Mitch Kapor

Mitch Kapor

Mitchell David Kapor is the founder of Lotus Development Corporation and the designer of Lotus 1-2-3. He is also a co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and was the first chair of the Mozilla Foundation...

(pessimist) and Kurzweil (optimist) about whether a computer will pass a Turing Test by the year 2029. The bet specifies the conditions in some detail.

Turing Colloquium

1990 was the fortieth anniversary of the first publication of Turing's "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" paper, and, thus, saw renewed interest in the test. Two significant events occurred in that year: The first was the Turing Colloquium, which was held at the University of Sussex

University of Sussex

The University of Sussex is an English public research university situated next to the East Sussex village of Falmer, within the city of Brighton and Hove. The University received its Royal Charter in August 1961....

in April, and brought together academics and researchers from a wide variety of disciplines to discuss the Turing Test in terms of its past, present, and future; the second was the formation of the annual Loebner Prize

Loebner prize

competition.

Blay Whitby

Blay Whitby

Dr Blay Whitby is a philosopher and technology ethicist, specialising in computer science, artificial intelligence and robotics. He is based at the University of Sussex, England....

lists four major turning points in the history of the Turing Test — the publication of "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" in 1950, the announcement of Joseph Weizenbaum

Joseph Weizenbaum

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

's ELIZA

ELIZA

in 1966, Kenneth Colby

Kenneth Colby

's creation of PARRY

PARRY

, which was first described in 1972, and the Turing Colloquium in 1990.

2005 Colloquium on Conversational Systems

In November 2005, the University of Surrey hosted an inaugural one-day meeting of artificial conversational entity developers,
attended by winners of practical Turing Tests in the Loebner Prize: Robby Garner, Richard Wallace and Rollo Carpenter. Invited speakers included David Hamill

David Hamill

David Hamill born at Ipswich, Queensland on 18 September 1957, is a former Queensland ALP politician, who served in a number of positions including Minister for Transport and Minister Assisting the Premier on Economic and Trade Development, Minister for Education and Treasurer. He was elected to...

, Hugh Loebner (sponsor of the Loebner Prize

Loebner prize

) and Huma Shah.

2008 AISB Symposium on the Turing Test

In parallel to the 2008 Loebner Prize

Loebner prize

held at the University of Reading

University of Reading

The University of Reading is a university in the English town of Reading, Berkshire. The University was established in 1892 as University College, Reading and received its Royal Charter in 1926. It is based on several campuses in, and around, the town of Reading.The University has a long tradition...

,
the Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and the Simulation of Behaviour

Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and the Simulation of Behaviour

The Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and the Simulation of Behaviour or SSAISB or AISB is a nonprofit, scientific society devoted to advancing the scientific understanding of the mechanisms underlying thought and intelligent behaviour and their simulation and embodiment in machines...

(AISB), hosted a one-day symposium to discuss the Turing Test, organised by John Barnden, Mark Bishop

Mark Bishop

Thomas Mark Bishop , has been an Australian Labor Party member of the Australian Senate representing the state of Western Australia since July 1996. He was born in Adelaide, South Australia and was educated at the University of Adelaide and Harvard University...

, Huma Shah and Kevin Warwick

Kevin Warwick

Kevin Warwick is a British scientist and professor of cybernetics at the University of Reading, Reading, Berkshire, United Kingdom...

.
The Speakers included Royal Institution's Director Baroness Susan Greenfield, Selmer Bringsjord

Selmer Bringsjord

Selmer Bringsjörd is the chair of the Department of Cognitive Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He is also a professor of Computer Science and Cognitive Science. He conducts research in Artificial Intelligence as the director of the Rensselaer AI & Reasoning Lab...

, Turing's biographer Andrew Hodges

Andrew Hodges

Andrew Hodges is a mathematician, an author and a pioneer of the gay liberation movement of the 1970s.For the past decades , Hodges has focused his research activities on the twistor theory — the new approach to the problems of fundamental physics pioneered by the mathematician Roger...

, and consciousness scientist Owen Holland

Owen Holland

Owen Holland is currently a professor of cognitive robotics in the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science at the University of Sussex. He was until recently a professor of computer science at the University of Essex, England...

. No agreement emerged for a canonical Turing Test, though Bringsjord expressed that a sizeable prize would result in the Turing Test being passed sooner.

2010 AISB symposium

Sixty years following its introduction, and continued argument over Turing's 'can machines think?' experiment, led to its reconsideration for the 21st century through the AISB, held from 29 March to 1 April 2010, at De Montford University, UK.

The Alan Turing Year, and Turing100 in 2012

A celebration of Turing’s life and scientific impact is planned for 2012, with a number of major events taking place throughout the year. These events are supported by the Turing100 group, which plans to organise a special Turing test event in Bletchley Park

Bletchley Park

Bletchley Park is an estate located in the town of Bletchley, in Buckinghamshire, England, which currently houses the National Museum of Computing...

during June 2010, celebrating the 100th anniversary of Turing's birth.

External links

Turing Test Page
The Turing Test - an Opera by Julian Wagstaff
The Turing Test- How accurate could the turing test really be?
Turing Test: 50 Years Later reviews a half-century of work on the Turing Test, from the vantage point of 2000.
Bet between Kapor and Kurzweil, including detailed justifications of their respective positions.
Why The Turing Test is AI's Biggest Blind Alley by Blay Witby
TuringHub.com Take the Turing Test, live, online
Jabberwacky.com An AI 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...

that learns from and imitates humans
New York Times essays on machine intelligence part 1 and part 2
Machines Who Think": Scientific American Frontiers
Scientific American Frontiers
Scientific American Frontiers was an American television program primarily focused on informing the public about new technologies and discoveries in science and medicine. It was a companion program to the Scientific American magazine. The show was produced for PBS in the U.S...

video on "the first ever [restricted] Turing test."
Wiki News: "Talk:Computer professionals celebrate 10th birthday of A.L.I.C.E."

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.

Philosophical background

Alan Turing

ELIZA and PARRY

The Chinese room

Loebner Prize

Versions of the Turing test

The Imitation Game

The standard interpretation

Imitation Game vs. Standard Turing Test

Should the interrogator know about the computer?

Tractability and simplicity

Breadth of subject matter

Weaknesses of the test

Human intelligence vs intelligence in general

Real intelligence vs simulated intelligence

Naivete of interrogators and the anthropomorphic fallacy

Impracticality and irrelevance: the Turing test and AI research

Variations of the Turing test

Reverse Turing test and CAPTCHA

Subject matter expert Turing test

Total Turing test

Minimum Intelligent Signal Test

Hutter Prize

Other tests based on compression or Kolmogorov Complexity

Ebert test

Predictions

Turing Colloquium

2005 Colloquium on Conversational Systems

2008 AISB Symposium on the Turing Test

2010 AISB symposium

The Alan Turing Year, and Turing100 in 2012

See also

External links