![]() This book is about what will probably be humankind’s most impressive – and perhaps final – achievement: the creation of an entity whose intelligence equals or exceeds our own. The editors are grateful to Ignacia Galvan for extensive editorial assistance. Turing’s 1950 paper, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence”, is reprinted in its entirety with permission of Oxford University Press. By the time you have worked through it, you will appreciate the issues at a level not heretofore possible. Consider this a very entertaining workbook. And since I cannot weigh in on them all, I will not weigh in on any of them, and will instead trust readers to use all the material here to draw their own conclusions. I am going to resist the strong temptation to critique the contributions, separating the sheep from the goats, endorsing this and deploring that, since doing them all justice would require a meta-volume, not just a foreword. ![]() I think Turing would be quite delighted with the results, and would not have regretted the fact that his conversation-stopper got put to an unintended use, since the contests (and the contests about the contests) have driven important and unanticipated observations into the light, enriching our sense of the abilities of machines and the subtlety of the thinking that machines might or might not be capable of executing. Here, the interested reader will find a fine cross section of the many issues raised by the Turing Test, by partisans in several disciplines, by participants in Loebner Prize competitions, and by interested bystanders who have more than a little relevant expertise. Someday I hope to write a more detailed account of the alternately amusing and frustrating problems that a philosopher encounters when a thought experiment becomes a real experiment, and if I do, I will have plenty of valuable material to draw on in this book. I was chair of the Loebner Prize Committee that administered the competition during its second, third, and fourth years, and have written briefly about that fascinating adventure in my book Brainchildren. But ironically, Turing’s conversation-stopper about holding a conversation has had just the opposite effect: it has started, and fueled, a half century and more of meta-conversation: the intermittently insightful, typically heated debate, both learned and ignorant, about the probity of the test – is it too easy or too difficult or too shallow or too deep or too anthropocentric or too technocratic – and anyway, could a machine pass it fair and square, and if so, what, if anything, would this imply? Robert Epstein played a central role in bringing a version – a truncated, dumbed down version – of the Turing Test to life in the annual Loebner Prize competitions, beginning in 1991, so he is ideally positioned to put together this survey anthology. Very sensibly he tried to impose some order on the debate by devising what he thought would be a conversation-stopper: he described a simple operational test that would surely satisfy the skeptics: anything that could pass this test would be a thinker for sure, wouldn’t it? The test was one he may have borrowed from René Descartes, who in the 17th century had declared that the sure way to tell a man from a machine was by seeing if it could hold a sensible conversation “as even the most stupid men can do”. To our children – Vincent, Eli, Bodhi, Julian, Justin, Jordan, and Jenelle – who will grow up in a computational world the likes of which we cannot imagineĪt the very dawn of the computer age, Alan Turing confronted a cacophony of mostly misguided debate about whether computer scientists could ever build a machine that could really think. No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher, with the exception of any material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and executed on a computer system, for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work. Library of Congress Control Number: 2007937657 © 2008 Springer Science + Business Media B.V. Grace Beber Gartner Consulting Stamford, CT USA ![]() Gary Roberts Teradata Corporation San Diego, CA USA Robert Epstein University of California San Diego, CA USA Parsing the Turing Test Philosophical and Methodological Issues in the Quest for the Thinking Computer
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