— Ch. 1 · Origins And Imitation Game —
Turing test.
~6 min read · Ch. 1 of 6
Alan Turing published his paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence in 1950 while working at the University of Manchester. The document opens with a single sentence that would define decades of debate: "I propose to consider the question, 'Can machines think?'" Turing knew this question was too vague to answer directly. He chose instead to replace it with a new problem expressed in unambiguous words. This new problem became known as the imitation game.
The original game involved three players. Player A was a man, player B was a woman, and player C was an interrogator of either sex. They sat in separate rooms and communicated only through written notes. Player C had to determine which of the other two was the man and which was the woman. Player A tried to trick the interrogator into making the wrong decision, while player B helped the interrogator make the right one.
Turing then asked what would happen if a machine took the place of player A. Would the interrogator decide wrongly as often when playing against a machine as they did when playing between a man and a woman? In 1952, Turing discussed a variation on BBC radio where 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. He predicted that by the end of the twentieth century, computers could be programmed so well that an average interrogator would not have more than a 70 percent chance of making the right identification after five minutes of questioning.
Philosophical Foundations
René Descartes wrote about automata in his 1637 Discourse on the Method. He noted that machines can respond to human interactions but argued they cannot respond appropriately to things said in their presence like any human can. This distinction defined the insufficiency of appropriate linguistic response as that which separates the human from the automaton. Descartes failed to consider the possibility that future automata might overcome such insufficiency.
Denis Diderot formulated a similar criterion in his 1746 book Pensées philosophiques. His argument maintained the implicit limiting assumption that participants were natural living beings rather than created artifacts. According to dualism, the mind is non-physical or has non-physical properties and therefore cannot be explained in purely physical terms. Materialism suggests the mind can be explained physically, leaving open the possibility of minds produced artificially.
Alfred Ayer considered the standard philosophical question of other minds in his 1936 book Language, Truth and Logic. He suggested a protocol to distinguish between a conscious man and an unconscious machine. The only ground for asserting that an object appearing conscious is not really a conscious being is that it fails to satisfy one of the empirical tests by which the presence or absence of consciousness is determined. A thing is not conscious if it fails the consciousness test.