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The Turing test is a proposal for a test of a as Turing suggested or, more recently, IRC or Instant Messaging . HISTORY The test was inspired by a Party Game 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 proposed a test employing the imitation 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?'" (Turing 1950) Later in the paper he suggested an "equivalent" alternative formulation involving a judge conversing only with a computer and a man. Turing originally proposed the test in order to replace the emotionally charged and (for him) meaningless question "Can machines think?" with a more well-defined one. The advantage of the new question, he said, was that it "drew a fairly sharp line between the physical and intellectual capacities of a man." OBJECTIONS AND REPLIES Turing himself suggested several objections which could be made to the test. Below are some of the objections and replies from the article in which Turing first proposed the test.
DISCUSSION OF RELEVANCE There has been some controversy over which of the alternate formulations of the test Turing intended. (Moor, 2003) It has been argued that the Turing test is so defined that it cannot serve as a valid definition of machine Intelligence or "machine thinking" for at least three reasons:
Another potential problem, related to the first objection above, is that even if the Turing test is a good operational definition of intelligence, it may not indicate that the machine has Consciousness , or that it has Intentionality . Perhaps intelligence and consciousness, for example, are such that neither one necessarily implies the other. In that case, the Turing test might fail to capture one of the key differences between intelligent machines and intelligent people. Of course, machines passing the test would most likely vehemently disagree. In the words of science popularizer Larry Gonick , "I personally disagree with this criterion, on the grounds that a simulation is not the real thing." (Gonick assumed he can tell them apart) These criticisms are directed to the Turing Test so defined, but other interpretations of Turing's "new question" have been discussed. Sterret argues that two distinct tests can be extracted from Turing's 1950 paper, and that, pace Turing's remark, they are not equivalent. The test that employs the party game and compares frequencies of success in the game 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". Sterrett agrees that the Standard Turing Test (STT) has the problems its critics cite, but argues that, in contrast, the Original Imitation Game Test (OIG Test) so defined is immune to many of them, due to a crucial difference: the OIG Test, unlike the STT, does not make similarity to a human performance the criterion of the test, even though it employs a human performance in setting a criterion for machine intelligence. A man can fail the OIG Test, but it is argued that this is a virtue of a test of intelligence if failure indicates a lack of resourcefulness. It is argued that 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 nonverbal versions of imitation games (Sterrett 2000). Still other writers (Genova (1994), Hayes and Ford (1995), Heil (1998), Dreyfus (1979)) have interpreted Turing to be proposing that the imitation game itself is the test, without specifying how to take into account Turing's statement that the test 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. PREDICTIONS AND TESTS 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 s (about 119.2 MiB ) of memory would be able to fool 30% of human judges during a 5-minute test. He also predicted that people would then no longer consider the phrase "thinking machine" contradictory. He further predicted that Machine Learning would be an important part of building powerful machines, a claim which is considered to be plausible by contemporary researchers in Artificial Intelligence . By extrapolating an Exponential Growth of technology over several decades, Futurist Ray Kurzweil predicted that Turing-test-capable computers would be manufactured around the year 2020, roughly speaking. See the Moore's Law article and the references therein for discussions of the plausibility of this argument. As Of 2007 , no computer has passed the Turing test as such. Simple conversational programs such as ELIZA have fooled people into believing they are talking to another human being, such as in an informal experiment termed AOLiza . However, such "successes" are not the same as a Turing Test. Most obviously, the human party in the conversation has no reason to suspect they are talking to anything other than a human, whereas in a real Turing test the questioner is actively trying to determine the nature of the entity they are chatting with. Documented cases are usually in environments such as Internet Relay Chat where conversation is sometimes stilted and meaningless, and in which no understanding of a conversation is necessary. Additionally, many internet relay chat participants use English as a second or third language, thus making it even more likely that they would assume that an unintelligent comment by the conversational program is simply something they have misunderstood, and don't recognize the very non-human errors they make. See ELIZA Effect . The Loebner Prize is an annual competition to determine the best Turing test competitors. Although they award an annual prize for the computer system that, in the judges' opinions, demonstrates the "most human" conversational behaviour (with learning AI Jabberwacky winning in 2005 and 2006 , and A.L.I.C.E. before that), they have an additional prize for a system that in their opinion passes a Turing test. This second prize has not yet been awarded. The creators of Jabberwacky have proposed a personal Turing Test: the ability to pass the imitation test while attempting to specifically imitate the human player, with whom the AI will have conversed at length before the test. {Link without Title} . Trying to pass the Turing test in its full generality is not, as of 2005, an active focus of much mainstream academic or commercial effort. Current research in AI-related fields is aimed at more modest and specific goals. There is an ongoing $10,000 bet at the Long Bet Project between Mitch Kapor and Ray Kurzweil about the question whether a computer will pass a Turing Test by the year 2029 . The bet specifies the Turing Test in some detail. TERMINOLOGY In Turing's paper, the term "Imitation Game" is used for his proposed test as well as the party game for men and women. The name "Turing test" may have been invented, and was certainly publicized, by '' ( 1968 ), where it is applied to the computer HAL 9000 . VARIATIONS OF THE TURING TEST A modification of the Turing test, where the objective or one or more of the roles have been reversed between computers and humans, is termed a Reverse Turing Test . Another variation of the Turing test is described as the Subject Matter Expert Turing Test where a computer's response cannot be distinguished from an expert in a given field. As brain and body scanning techniques improve it may also be possible to replicate the essential Data Element s of a person to a computer system. 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. The Minimum Intelligent Signal Test proposed by Chris McKinstry , is another variation of Turing's test, but 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. Another variation of the reverse Turing test is implied in the work of psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion (1979), who was particularly fascinated by the "storm" that resulted from the encounter of one mind by another. Carrying this idea forward, R. D. Hinshelwood (2001) described the mind as a "mind recognizing apparatus," noting that this might be some sort of "supplement" to the Turing test. To make this more explicit, 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 Turing was attempting to answer, but would, perhaps, be a high enough standard to define a machine that could "think" in a way we typically define as characteristically human. Another variation is the Meta Turing test, in which the subject being tested (for example a computer) is classified as intelligent if it itself has created something that the subject itself wants to test for intelligence PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS CAPTCHA is a form of Reverse Turing Test . When, for example, logging on to a Website , the user is presented with a word or number in a distorted graphic image and asked to enter it. If the value entered does not match what is expected, then the user is rejected. This is intended to prevent automated systems from using the site. The assumption is that software sufficiently sophisticated to read the distorted image accurately either does not exist or is not available to the average user, so any system that is able to do so must be a human being. REFERENCES
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