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Turing test



 
 
The Turing test is a proposal for a test of a machine
Machine

A machine is any device that uses energy to perform some activity. 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 demonstrate intelligence
Intelligence

Intelligence is an umbrella term used to describe a property of the mind that encompasses many related abilities, such as the capacities to reason, to plan, to problem solving, to think abstraction, to comprehend ideas, to use language, and to Learning....
. Described by Alan Turing
Alan Turing

Alan Mathison Turing, Order of the British Empire, Fellow of the Royal Society was a British mathematician, logician and Cryptanalysis....
 in the 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....
", it proceeds as follows: a human judge engages in a natural language conversation
Conversation

A conversation is communication by two, three, or more people. It is a social skill that is not difficult for most individuals. Conversations are the ideal form of communication in some respects, since they allow people with different views on a topic to learn from each other....
 with one human
Human

A human being, also human or man, is a member of a species of bipedalism primates in the family Hominidae . Mitochondrial DNA evidence indicates that modern humans originated in east Africa about 200,000 years ago....
 and one machine, each of which tries to appear human. All participants are placed in isolated locations. If the judge cannot reliably tell the machine from the human, the machine is said to have passed the test.






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Encyclopedia


The Turing test is a proposal for a test of a machine
Machine

A machine is any device that uses energy to perform some activity. 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 demonstrate intelligence
Intelligence

Intelligence is an umbrella term used to describe a property of the mind that encompasses many related abilities, such as the capacities to reason, to plan, to problem solving, to think abstraction, to comprehend ideas, to use language, and to Learning....
. Described by Alan Turing
Alan Turing

Alan Mathison Turing, Order of the British Empire, Fellow of the Royal Society was a British mathematician, logician and Cryptanalysis....
 in the 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....
", it proceeds as follows: a human judge engages in a natural language conversation
Conversation

A conversation is communication by two, three, or more people. It is a social skill that is not difficult for most individuals. Conversations are the ideal form of communication in some respects, since they allow people with different views on a topic to learn from each other....
 with one human
Human

A human being, also human or man, is a member of a species of bipedalism primates in the family Hominidae . Mitochondrial DNA evidence indicates that modern humans originated in east Africa about 200,000 years ago....
 and one machine, each of which tries to appear human. All participants are placed in isolated locations. If the judge cannot reliably tell the machine from the human, the machine is said to have passed the test. In order to test the machine's intelligence rather than its ability to render words into audio, the conversation is limited to a text-only channel such as a computer keyboard
Keyboard (computing)

In computing, a keyboard is an input device, partially modeled after the Typewriter#Keyboard layout, which uses an arrangement of buttons or Push-button, which act as mechanical levers or electronic switches....
 and screen.

History


Philosophical background

Although the field of artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence is the intelligence of machines and the branch of computer science which aims to create it. Major AI textbooks define the field as "the study and design of intelligent agents,"...
 research was founded in 1956, its philosophical roots extend back considerably further. The question of whether or not 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 mind phenomena are, in some respects, non-physical entity....
 and materialist
Materialism

The philosophy of materialism holds that the only thing that can be truly proven to existence is matter, and is considered a form of physicalism....
 views of the mind. From the perspective of dualism, the mind
Mind

Mind refers to the aspects of intellect and consciousness manifested as combinations of thought, perception, memory, emotion, free will and imagination, including all of the brain's conscious and unconscious cognitive processes....
 is non-physical
Non-physical entity

A non-physical entity is an entity that lacks a physical body or matter 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 holds that while 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. The materialist perspective, on the other hand, argues that the mind can be explained physically, and thus leaves open the possibility of minds that are artificially produced.

In 1936, philosopher Alfred Ayer
Alfred Ayer

Sir Alfred Jules Ayer , better known as A. J. Ayer or "Freddie" to friends, 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 Britain
Great Britain

Great Britain is an island lying to the northwest of Continental Europe. It is the List of islands by area, and the largest in Europe. With a population of 58.9 million people it is List of islands by population....
 had been exploring "machine intelligence" for up to ten years prior to 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 psychology, physiology, mathematics and engineering who met to discuss issues in cybernetics....
, an informal group of British cybernetics
Cybernetics

Cybernetics is the interdisciplinary study of the structure of regulatory systems. Cybernetics is closely related to control theory and systems theory....
 and electronics
Electronics

Electronics refers to the flow of charge through nonmetal electrical conductor , whereas electrical refers to the flow of charge through metal electrical conductor....
 researchers that included Alan Turing
Alan Turing

Alan Mathison Turing, Order of the British Empire, Fellow of the Royal Society was a British mathematician, logician and Cryptanalysis....
, 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.


Thus, by the time Turing published "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....
", he had been considering the possibility of artificial intelligence for many years. This, however, was the first published paper by Turing to focus exclusively on the notion.

Turing begins his 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 statement of the Meaning of a word or phrase. The term to be defined is known as the definiendum . The words which define it are known as the definiens ....
s, defining both the terms "machine" and "intelligence". Turing, however, 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 which share several features suitable to entertaining a social gathering of moderate size.*The number of participants is flexible and fairly large....
 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. Turing proposes recreating 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 match 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 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 that have been raised in the years since his paper was first 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

Blay Whitby 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 Massachusetts Institute of Technology.Born in Berlin, Germany to Jewish parents, he escaped Nazi Germany in 1935, emigrating with his family to the United States....
's ELIZA
ELIZA

ELIZA is a computer program by Joseph Weizenbaum, designed in 1966, which parodied a Rogerian psychotherapy, largely by rephrasing many of the patient's statements as questions and posing them to the patient....
 in 1966, 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....
's creation of PARRY
PARRY

PARRY is, besides ELIZA, the other famous early chatterbot. PARRY was written in 1972 by psychiatrist Kenneth Colby, then at Stanford University....
, which was first described in 1972, and the Turing Colloquium in 1990.

ELIZA works by examining a user's typed comments for keywords. If a keyword is found, a rule is applied which transforms the user's comments, and the resulting sentence is returned. If a keyword is not found, ELIZA responds with either 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 , also known as Client-centered therapy or Rogerian Psychotherapy, was developed by the humanist 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, since the human "interrogators" had been primed to expect interaction with a human psychotherapist, and were initially unaware of the possibility that they were interacting with a computer.

Colby's PARRY has been described as "ELIZA with attitude": it attempts to model the behaviour of a paranoid
Paranoia

Paranoia is a thought process characterized by excessive anxiety or fear, often to the point of irrationality and delusion. Paranoid thinking typically includes persecutory beliefs 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 teletype machines. 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 only able to make the correct identification 48 per cent of the time — a figure consistent with random guessing.. Note that these experiments were not Turing tests, since a Turing test requires that the integerator is able to ask interactive questions, rather than an offline transcript, in order to decide whether the subject is a human or a computer program.

The Chinese room

John Searle
John Searle

John Rogers Searle is an American philosopher and the Slusser Professor of Philosophy and Mills Professor of Philosophy of Mind and Language at the University of California, Berkeley ....
's 1980 paper Minds, Brains, and Programs proposed an argument against the Turing Test known as the "Chinese room
Chinese room

The Chinese Room argument comprises a thought experiment and associated arguments by John Searle , which attempts to show that a symbol-processing machine like a computer can never be properly described as having a "mind" or "intentionality", regardless of how intelligently it may behave....
" 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, contrary to Turing's original proposal.

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

Philosophy of mind is the branch of philosophy that studies the nature of the mind, mental events, mental functions, mental property, consciousness and their relationship to the physical body, particularly the brain....
 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.

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 a British campus university situated next to the East Sussex village of Falmer, from Brighton. It was the first of the New Universities of Plate glass university....
 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

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....
 competition.

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 an United States inventor, holding five United States Patent and Trademark Office, and an outspoken social Activism for the decriminalization of prostitution....
; the Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies in Massachusetts
Massachusetts

The Commonwealth of Massachusetts is a U.S. state located in the New England region of the Northeastern United States United States. It borders Rhode Island and Connecticut to the south, New York to the west, and Vermont and New Hampshire to the north....
, United States
United States

The United States of America is a Federal government constitutional republic comprising U.S. state and a federal district. The country is situated mostly in central North America, where its Contiguous United States and Washington, D.C., the Capital districts and territories, lie between the Pacific Ocean and Atlantic Oceans, Borders of the U...
 organised the Prizes up to and including the 2003 contest. As Loebner described it, the competition was created to advance the state of AI research, at least in part because "no one had taken steps to implement it."

The silver (audio) 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 (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 United Kingdom programmer Rollo Carpenter. Its stated aim is to "simulate natural human chat in an interesting, entertaining and humorous manner"....
 won in 2005 and 2006. Its creators have proposed a personalized variation: the ability to pass the imitation test while attempting specifically to imitate the human player, with whom the machine will have conversed at length before the test.

The Loebner Prize tests conversational intelligence; winners are typically chatterbot
Chatterbot

A chatterbot is a type of conversational agent, a computer program designed to simulate an intelligent conversation with one or more human users via auditory or textual methods....
 programs, or Artificial Conversational Entities (ACE)s. Early Loebner Prizes ruled 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 ), and coordinator (Huma Shah ) felt the artificial conversational entities were not technically advanced to converse for longer. Ironically, the 2008 winning entry, Elbot does not mimic a human; its personality is that of a robot yet it deceived three human judges it was the human during human-parallel comparisons. Transcripts can be found at .

The Loebner Prize led to renewed discussion of the viability of the Turing Test and the value of pursuing it. The Economist
The Economist

The Economist is an English-language weekly news and international relations publication owned by The Economist Newspaper Ltd. and edited in London....
, 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....
", commented that the first Loebner winner won, at least in part, because it was able to "imitate human typing errors". (Turing had suggested that programs add errors into their output, so as to be better "players" of the game.) Others have argued that trying to pass the Turing Test is merely a distraction from more fruitful research.. A second issue was revealed in early Prizes: the use of "unsophisticated" interrogators, make it possible to pass through cleverly crafted manipulation, rather than anything one could plausibly consider intelligence. However, since 2004 the Loebner Prizes have deployed philosophers, computer scientists and journalists among the interrogators.

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 , Hugh Loebner (sponsor of the 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....
) and Huma Shah .

AISB 2008 Symposium on the Turing Test

In parallel to 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....
 held at the University of Reading
University of Reading

The University of Reading is a university in the England town of Reading, Berkshire. Established in 1892, receiving its Royal Charter in 1926, the University has a long tradition of research, education and training at a local, national and international level....
 , The Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and Simulation of Behaviour (AISB ), hosted a one-day symposium to discuss the Turing Test, organised by John Barnden , Mark Bishop, Huma Shah and Kevin Warwick
Kevin Warwick

Kevin Warwick is a United Kingdom scientist and professor of cybernetics at the University of Reading, United Kingdom. He is probably best known for his studies on direct neural interface between computer systems and the human nervous system, although he has done much research in the field of robotics....
. Speakers included Royal Institution's Director Baroness Susan Greenfield , Selmer Bringsjord , Turing's biographer Andrew Hodges and consciousness scientist Owen Holland . No agreement emerged for a canonical Turing Test, however Bringsjord expressed that a sizeable prize would result in the Turing Test being passed sooner.

Turing100 in 2012

A committee set up to organise events celebrating the 100th anniversary of Turing's birth in 2012, with a goal to take Turing's idea for a thinking machine, picturised in Hollywood movies such as Blade Runner, to a wider audience including children. Provisional members include Kevin Warwick
Kevin Warwick

Kevin Warwick is a United Kingdom scientist and professor of cybernetics at the University of Reading, United Kingdom. He is probably best known for his studies on direct neural interface between computer systems and the human nervous system, although he has done much research in the field of robotics....
, Chair , Huma Shah, coordinator, Ian Bland, Chris Chapman, Marc Allen, Rory Dunlop, Loebner winners Robby Garner
Robby Garner

Robby Garner is a natural language programmer and software developer. He won the 1998 and 1999 Loebner prize Contests with the program called Albert One....
 and Fred Roberts. It is supported by and

Versions of the Turing test

There are at least three primary versions of the Turing test, two of which are offered in "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" and one which Saul Traiger describes as the "Standard Interpretation". While there is some debate as to whether or not 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.

The Imitation Game

Turing, as we have seen, described a simple party game involving three players. Player A is a man, player B a woman and player C (who plays the role of the interrogator) of either gender. In the Imitation Game, player C is unable to see either player A or player B, and can only communicate with them 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.

In what SG Sterret refers to as the "Original Imitation Game Test", Turing proposes that the role of player A be filled by a computer. The computer's task is thus 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.

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 woman, but rather whether or not a computer could imitate a human. While there is some dispute as to whether or not 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 gender. 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.

Imitation Game vs. Standard Turing Test

There has arisen some controversy 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.

Should the interrogator know about the computer?

Turing never makes clear whether or not the interrogator in his tests is aware that one of the participants is a computer. 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 and others highlight, however, this makes a big difference to the implementation and outcome of the test.

Strengths of the test


Breadth of subject matter

The power of the Turing test derives from the fact that it is possible to talk about anything. 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 is a professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago. He was chair of the philosophy department from 2005-2007. He previously taught at the University of Pittsburgh and University of California, Berkeley, and was a member of the Palo Alto Research Center....
 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 concerned with the interactions between computers and human languages. Natural language generation systems convert information from computer databases into readable human language....
, reason
Commonsense reasoning

Commonsense reasoning is the branch of Artificial intelligence concerned with replicating human thinking. There are several components to this problem, including:...
, have knowledge
Knowledge representation

Knowledge representation is an area in artificial intelligence that is concerned with how to formally "think", that is, how to use a symbol system to represent "a domain of discourse" - that which can be talked about, along with functions that may or may not be within the domain of discourse that allow inference about the objects within the...
 and learn
Machine learning

Machine learning is the subfield of artificial intelligence that is concerned with the design and development of algorithms that allow computers to improve their performance over time based on 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 the science and technology of machines that see. As a scientific discipline, computer vision is concerned with the theory for building artificial systems that obtain information from images....
 and robotics
Robotics

Robotics is the science and technology of robots, and their design, manufacture, and application. Robotics has connections to electronics, mechanics, and software....
 as well. Together, these represent almost all of the major problems of artificial intelligence.

Weaknesses of the test

The Turing test has been criticized on several grounds.

Human intelligence vs intelligence in general

It only tests whether or not the computer resembles a human being. Human behaviour and intelligent behaviour are not exactly the same thing. The test will fail to accurately measure general intelligence
Strong AI

Strong AI is artificial intelligence that matches or exceeds intelligence ?the intelligence of a machine that can successfully perform any intellectual task that a human being can....
 in two ways:

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

A lie , is a type of deception in the form of an untruthful statement, especially with the intention to deceive others, often with the further intention to maintain a secret or reputation, protect someone's feelings or to avoid a punishment....
 or, simply, a high frequency of typing mistakes
Typographical error

A typographical error is a mistake made during, originally, the manual type-setting of printed material, or more recently, the typing process....
. If a machine cannot imitate human behaviour in detail, bad typing and all, it fails the test, regardless of how intelligent it may be. Some intelligent behaviour is inhuman: The Turing test does not test for highly intelligent behaviours, 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 it were to solve a computational problem that is impossible for a human to solve, then by definition it would fail the test.

Real intelligence vs simulated intelligence

It only tests how the subject acts—the external behaviour of the machine. In this regard, it assumes a behaviourist or functionalist definition of intelligence. The example of ELIZA
ELIZA

ELIZA is a computer program by Joseph Weizenbaum, designed in 1966, which parodied a Rogerian psychotherapy, largely by rephrasing many of the patient's statements as questions and posing them to the patient....
 suggested that a machine passing the test may be able to simulate human conversational behaviour 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 the Slusser Professor of Philosophy and Mills Professor of Philosophy of Mind and Language at the University of California, Berkeley ....
 argued that external behaviour can not be used to determine if a machine is "actually" thinking or merely "simulating thinking". His chinese room
Chinese room

The Chinese Room argument comprises a thought experiment and associated arguments by John Searle , which attempts to show that a symbol-processing machine like a computer can never be properly described as having a "mind" or "intentionality", regardless of how intelligently it may behave....
 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

Mind refers to the aspects of intellect and consciousness manifested as combinations of thought, perception, memory, emotion, free will and imagination, including all of the brain's conscious and unconscious cognitive processes....
, consciousness
Consciousness

Consciousness is a difficult term to define, because the word is used and understood in a wide variety of ways, so that it frequently happens that what one person sees as a definition of consciousness is seen by others as about something else altogether....
, the ability to "understand" or have actual thoughts that "mean" anything (what philosophers call intentionality
Intentionality

The term intentionality is often simplistically summarized as "aboutness". According to the Oxford English Dictionary, it is "the distinguishing property of mind of being necessarily directed upon an Object , whether real or imaginary"....
).

Turing responded to this line of criticism in his original paper, writing that:

Irrelevance

The Turing test is not an active focus of much mainstream academic or commercial effort—as Stuart Russell
Stuart Russell

Stuart Russell may refer to:* Stuart Russell , British Conservative party politician, MP for Darwen 1935–1943* Stuart J. Russell , computer scientist known for his contributions to artificial intelligence...
 and Peter Norvig
Peter Norvig

Peter Norvig is an United States computer science. He is currently the Director of Research at GoogleHe is a Fellow and Councilor of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence and co-author, with Stuart J....
 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 realisation of strategy or action sequences, typically for execution by intelligent agents, autonomous robots and unmanned aerial vehicle....
, 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 even when they are translated or rotated....
 or logistics
Logistics

Logistics is the management of the flow of goods, information and other resources, including energy and people, between the point of origin and the point of consumption in order to meet the requirements of consumers ....
. 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 is the aggregate of means by which people—the User s—Interaction with the system—a particular machine, device, computer program or other complex tools....
, 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

File:An-225 Mriya.jpgFile:Atlantis on Shuttle Carrier Aircraft.jpgFile:Typhoon f2 zj910 arp.jpgAeronautics is the science involved with the study, design, and manufacture of flight-capable machines, or the techniques of operating aircraft....
 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 considers the relationship between machines and thought and attempts to answer such question as:...
. As such, it is not surprising that the Turing test has had so little influence on AI research. The philosophy of AI, writes John McCarthy
John McCarthy (computer scientist)

John McCarthy , is an United States computer scientist and cognitive scientist who received the Turing Award in 1971 for his major contributions to the field of Artificial Intelligence ....
, "is unlikely to have any more effect on the practice of AI research than philosophy of science generally has on the practice of science."

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 a binary numeral system numerical digit, taking a value of either 0 or 1. Binary digits are a basic unit of information Computer data storage and transmission in digital computing and digital information theory....
s (about 119.2 MiB
Mebibyte

The Mebibyte is a standards-based binary prefix of the byte, a unit of Computer data storage. Mebibyte is abbreviated MiB.The unit prefix mebi was defined by the International Electrotechnical Commission in December 1998....
 or approximately 120 megabyte
Megabyte

Megabyte is a SI prefix-multiple of the unit byte for digital information computer storage or transmission and is equal to 106 bytes....
s) of memory would be able to fool thirty per cent 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

Machine learning is the subfield of artificial intelligence that is concerned with the design and development of algorithms that allow computers to improve their performance over time based on data, such as from sensor data or databases....
 would be an important part of building powerful machines, a claim considered plausible by contemporary researchers in artificial intelligence.

By extrapolating an exponential growth
Technological singularity

The technological singularity is a theoretical future point of unprecedented technological progress?typically associated with advancements in computer hardware or the ability of machines to improve themselves using artificial intelligence....
 of technology over several decades, futurist
Futurology

Futures Studies, Foresight, or Futurology is the science, art and Postulating, probable, and preferable future and the worldviews and myths that underlie them....
 Raymond Kurzweil
Raymond Kurzweil

Raymond Kurzweil is an inventor and futurist. He has been a pioneer in the fields of optical character recognition , speech synthesis, speech recognition technology, and electronic keyboard instruments....
 predicted that Turing test-capable computers would be manufactured around the year 2020, roughly speaking. See the "Moore's Law
Moore's Law

Moore's law describes a long-term trend in the history of computing hardware. Since the invention of the integrated circuit in 1958, the number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit has increased exponential growth, doubling approximately every two years....
" article and the references therein for discussions of the plausibility of this argument.

The Long Bet Project is of $
United States dollar

The United States dollar is the unit of currency of the United States and was defined by the Coinage Act of 1792 to be between 371 and 416 grains of silver ....
10,000 between Mitch Kapor
Mitch Kapor

Mitchell David Kapor is the founder of Lotus Development Corporation and the designer of Lotus 1-2-3....
 (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.

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 or 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 Distinguished Service Order was a UK Psychoanalysis. A pioneer in group dynamics, he was associated with the 'Tavistock group', the group of pioneering psychologists that founded the Tavistock Institute in 1946 on the basis of their shared wartime experiences....
, who was particularly fascinated by the "storm" that resulted from the encounter of one mind by another. Carrying this idea forward, R. D. Hinshelwood
R. D. Hinshelwood

Robert D Hinshelwood is Professor of Psychoanalysis 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", noting that this might be some sort of "supplement" to the Turing test. 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 or Captcha is a type of challenge-response authentication test used in computing to ensure that the response is not generated by a computer....
 is a form of reverse Turing test. Before being allowed to perform some action on a website
Website

A Web site is a collection of related Web pages, images, videos or other digital assets that are hosted on one Web server, usually accessible via the 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 abusing 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. The implication would appear to be (although it not necessary is) that artificial intelligence has not as yet been achieved.

Subject matter expert Turing test

Another variation is described as the subject matter expert
Subject Matter Expert

A Subject Matter Expert is a person who is an expert in a particular area. In software engineering environments, the term is used to describe professionals with expertise in the field of application but without technical project knowledge....
 Turing test, where a machine's response cannot be distinguished from an expert in a given field. As brain
Neuroimaging

Neuroimaging includes the use of various techniques to either directly or indirectly imaging the neuroanatomy, function/pharmacology of the brain....
 and body scan
Full-body scan

Full-body scan, also known as a full-body CT scan, involves a Computed tomography scan of the patient's entire body to support the diagnosis and treatment of specific illnesses....
ning techniques improve, it may also be possible to replicate the essential data element
Data element

In metadata, the term data element is an atomic unit of data that has precise meaning or precise semantics. A data element has:# An identification such as a data element name...
s of a person to a computer system.

Immortality test

The Immortality-test variation of the Turing test would determine if a person's essential character is reproduced with enough fidelity to make it impossible to distinguish a reproduction of a person from the original person.

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....
, is another variation of Turing's test, where only binary responses are permitted. It is typically used to gather statistical data against which the performance of artificial intelligence programs may be measured.

Meta Turing test

Yet another variation is the Meta Turing test, in which the subject being tested (say, a computer) is classified as intelligent if it itself has created something that the subject itself wants to test for intelligence.

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 in the ; enwik8 is the first 100,000,000 c...
 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 doesn't require the computer to lie to the judge -- teaching computers to lie is widely regarded as a bad idea.


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 intelligence tests


There are a variety of intelligence tests used to test humans. It may be possible to use such tests to test artificial intelligences. Some tests (such as the C-test ) derived from Kolmogorov Complexity
Kolmogorov complexity

In algorithmic information theory , the Andrey Kolmogorov complexity of an object such as a piece of text is a measure of the computational resources needed to specify the object....
 have been used to both evaluate humans and computers.

See also

  • Artificial intelligence in fiction
    Artificial intelligence in fiction

    This is a sub-article of Artificial intelligence , describing the different futuristic portrayals of fictional artificial intelligence in books and film....
  • Computer game bot Turing Test
    Computer game bot Turing Test

    The Computer game bot Turing Test is a variant of the Turing Test, where a human judge viewing and interacting with a virtual world should be unable to distinguish between other humans interacting with the world and Computer game bot that interact with the world....
  • Graphics Turing Test
    Graphics Turing Test

    The Graphics Turing Test is a variant of the Turing Test, the twist being that a human judge viewing and interacting with an artificially generated world should be unable to reliably distinguish it from reality....
  • HAL 9000
    HAL 9000

    HAL 9000 is a fictional computer in Arthur C. Clarke's Space Odyssey saga. The novels, along with two films, begin with 2001: A Space Odyssey, released in 1968....
     (Kubrick's AI)
  • Mark V Shaney
    Mark V Shaney

    Mark V Shaney is a fake Usenet user whose postings were generated by using Markov chain techniques. The name is a play on the words "Markov chain"....
     (USENET bot)
  • Simulated reality
    Simulated reality

    Simulated reality is the proposition that reality could be simulated?perhaps by computer simulation?to a degree indistinguishable from "true" reality....
  • Technological singularity
    Technological singularity

    The technological singularity is a theoretical future point of unprecedented technological progress?typically associated with advancements in computer hardware or the ability of machines to improve themselves using artificial intelligence....
  • Uncanny valley
    Uncanny Valley

    The uncanny valley is a hypothesis that when robots and other facsimiles of humans look and act almost like actual humans, it causes a response of revulsion among human observers....
  • Voight-Kampff machine
    Voight-Kampff machine

    The Voight-Kampff machine or device is a fictional tool originating in Philip K. Dick science fiction novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?....


Further reading

  • B. Jack Copeland, ed., The Essential Turing: The ideas that gave birth to the computer age (2004). ISBN 0-19-825080-0
  • Larry Gonick
    Larry Gonick

    Larry Gonick is a cartoonist best known for The Cartoon History of the Universe, a history of the world in comic book form, which he has been publishing in installments since 1977....
    , The Cartoon Guide to the Computer (1983, originally The Cartoon Guide to Computer Science). ISBN 0-06-273097-5.
  • S. G. Sterrett "Nested Algorithms and the 'Original Imitation Game Test'," Minds and Machines (2002). ISSN 0924-6495
  • A.P. Saygin, I. Cicekli, and V Akman (2000), 'Turing Test: 50 Years Later', Minds and Machines 10(4): 463-518. (reprinted in The Turing Test: The Elusive Standard of Artificial Intelligence edited by James H. Moor, Kluwer Academic 2003) ISBN 1-4020-1205-5. (Thorough review. Online version at )
  • Saygin, A.P. & Cicekli I (2002): (Abstract and links to pdf, if permitted), Journal of Pragmatics, Volume 34, Issue 3, March 2002, Pages 227-258.
  • Shah, H. (2006): "Chatterbox Challenge 2005: Geography of a Modern Eliza" Proceedings of 3rd International Workshop on Natural Language Understanding and Cognitive Science – NLUCS 2006 in conjunction with ICEIS 2006 Cyprus, Paphos, May 2006 ISBN 972-8865-50-3 pp 133–138
  • Shah, H. (2005): TripleC, Vol 4, No 2
  • Shah, H. & Henry, O. (2005): Proceedings of 5th WSEAS Int. Conf. on Information Science, Communications and Applications (WSEAS ISCA), May 11– 14, 2005, Cancun, Mexico, ISBN 960-8457-22-X, pp 109–114


External links

  • - How accurate could the turing test really be?
  • entry on , by G. Oppy and .
  • lists recent articles, links, and other info on the test.
  • reviews a half-century of work on the Turing Test, from the vantage point of 2000.
  • , including detailed justifications of their respective positions.
  • by Blay Witby
  • at proving the non-intelligence of a Twinkie
    Twinkie

    A Twinkie is a "Golden Sponge Cake with Creamy Filling" popular in the United States and elsewhere in North America. It is distributed by Continental Baking Company, which is owned by Kansas City, Missouri-based Interstate Bakeries Corporation....
  • Take the Turing Test, live, online
  • An AI chatterbot
    Chatterbot

    A chatterbot is a type of conversational agent, a computer program designed to simulate an intelligent conversation with one or more human users via auditory or textual methods....
     that learns from and imitates humans
  • New York Times essays on machine intelligence and
  • Jeopardy winner Ken Jennings
    Ken Jennings

    Kenneth Wayne Jennings III holds the record for the longest winning streak on the United States Television syndication game show Jeopardy! and, as of October 10, 2008, once again became the all-time leading money winner on American game shows....
     blogs about a humorous Turing-challenged conversation with his toddler son.
  • : Scientific American Frontiers
    Scientific American Frontiers

    Scientific American Frontiers was an United States television program primarily focused on informing the public about new technology and discoveries in science and medicine....
     video on "the first ever [restricted] Turing test."
  • .
  • "Talk:Computer professionals celebrate 10th birthday of A.L.I.C.E."