[Home]Turing Test

HomePage | Recent Changes | Preferences

Showing revision 18
The Turing Test is a proposal for a test of machine capabilities described by Alan Turing in 1950. It proceeds as follows: a human judge engages in a natural language conversation with other parties; if the judge cannot reliably tell whether the other party is human or machine, then the machine is said to pass the test. It is assumed that both the humans and the machine try to appear human.

The origin of the test is a [party game]? where guests try to guess the gender? of a person in another room by writing a series of questions on notes and reading the answers sent back. In Turing's original proposal, the human participants had to pretend to be the other gender, and the test was limited to a five-minute conversation. These features are nowadays not considered to be essential and are generally not included in the specification of the Turing test.

Turing proposed the test in order to replace the emotionally charged and for him meaningless question "Can machines think?" with a more well-defined one.

Turing predicted that machines would eventually be able to pass the test. In fact, he estimated that by the year 2000, machines with 109 bits (about 119MB) of memory would be able to fool 30% of human judges during a 5-minute test. He also predicted that people then won't consider the phrase "thinking machine" to be contradictory any more. He further predicted that [machine learning]? would be an important part of building powerful machines, a claim which is considered to be plausible by contemporary researchers in Artificial Intelligence.

It has been argued that the Turing test can not serve as a valid definition of machine intelligence or "machine thinking" for at least two reasons:

On the other hand, the intelligence of fellow humans is almost always judged exclusively based on their utterances.

So far, no computer has passed the Turing test. The [Loebner prize]? is an annual competition to determine the best Turing test competitors.


References


/Talk

HomePage | Recent Changes | Preferences
This page is read-only | View other revisions | View current revision
Edited August 27, 2001 4:08 am by LC (diff)
Search: