Glossary · −18° Superintelligence
Turing test
A game proposed by Alan Turing in 1950: if an interrogator cannot tell a machine from a human in written conversation, do we still have any reason to deny the machine the name of thought?
Definition
Turing judged the question “can machines think?” too vague to discuss. He replaced it with an “imitation game”: a judge converses in writing with two hidden interlocutors and must guess which one is the machine. He predicted that by the year 2000, an average interrogator would have no more than a seventy per cent chance of guessing right after five minutes.
The test has been criticised from every side: it measures imitation, not understanding, and rewards the art of deception. But it has a lasting virtue. It reminds us that, even among humans, we have never had any access to other minds beyond what they say and do. It is the very principle of our “Human or machine?” series.
See also
Related notions
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