The Turing Test

Can machines think? This question is difficult to answer because the words ";machines" and "think" and even the word "can" are open to different interpretations. Alan Turing thought that the question was "too meaningless to deserve discussion" and suggested that we replace consideration of this question with a contest that is now called the "Turing Test." In a famous article published in 1950, Turing described an "imitation game" in which an interrogator tries to determine solely on the basis of a written interrogation of a man and a woman which is the man and which is the woman. The man in the imitation game tries to imitate a woman and answers the questions as he believes a woman would answer. Turing suggested that we apply the idea of the imitation game to computers and people. Could a human interrogator who uses a teletypewriter to communicate with a human and with a computer determine from the conversation which is the human and which is the computer respondent? The objective for the computer program in the game is to imitate a human. The computer might say that it had curly hair, liked chocolate ice cream, and preferred skiing to skating. Turing believed that the processes generating intelligent behavior could be understood in terms of computable functions, functions that his Turing machines could compute. Hence, Turing believed that an actual computer, if properly programmed, perhaps programmed to learn as a child does, might one day pass the test. Such a computer would produce verbal behavior that was indistinguishable from that of a human being. Turing did not give full details of his proposed test and variations are possible, but it is usually assumed that the interrogator is an intelligent human who asks numerous, penetrating questions and the human subject is a typical, normal, adult respondent.