Acting Humanly : The Turing Test Approach


The Turing Test. Proposed by Alan Turing (1950), was designed to provide a satisfactory operational definition of intelligence. Turing defined intelligent behavior as the abillity to achieve human-level performance in all cognitive tasks, sufficient to fool an interrogator.

Roughly speaking, the test he proposed is that the computer should be interogattted by a human via a teletype, and passes the test if the interrogator cannot tell if there is a computer or a human at the other end. Chapter 26 discuses the detail ot the test, and wheater or not a computer is really intelligent if it passes.

For now, programming a computer to pass the test provides plenty to work on. The computer would need to possess the following capabilities:

  • Natural language processing
  • Knowledge representation
  • automated reasoning
  • machine learning
Turing's test delibereately avoided direct physical interaction between the interrogator and the computer, because physical simulation of a person in unnecessary for intelligence.



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