Dan Brown; Rev. Dodgson; Babbage; Turing

[David Casseres]

It's a mistake to read too much into the "Turing Test" of artificial
intelligence.  It was proposed merely as an objective goal toward which
computer engineers might strive, and was never thought to be a statement
about human intelligence.  Today, no computer scientist doubts that the
Turing Test can be satisfied, perhaps by existing computers, if someone
spent the time to create the elaborate illusion required.

There is considerable doubt that if the Test were satisfied, people would
indeed regard it as the achievement of true artificial intelligence.  After
all, it was once thought that if machines could play good chess, that would
be "intelligence"; today they do play good chess and it's regarded as a
pretty cool technical achievement, but not the real thing.

On 2/4/07, Glenn Scheper <glenn_scheper at earthlink.net> wrote:
>
> In his famous article "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" in the
> British philosophical journal Mind, Turing had discussed the idea of a
> deterministic machine simulating human behaviour. If, he said, the machine
> could not be distinguished objectively from a human, then one would have to
> credit it with intelligence. This raises the existential question of whether
> or not humans are biological automata, whether death is the condition of a
> machine halting. Can mind exist without body? If so, in what manner? Turing
> had been fascinated by this since his childhood. He could find his answer
> only by first-hand experience. If this was not the primary motivation for
> Turing's suicide, it must at least have been in his mind when he bit into
> the apple. Turing's death served a dual purpose: it was an escape from
> social systems as well as a way of possibly answering the mind-body
> question.
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