How does the Turing test work, and why is it still debatable whether it has been passed or not?
In: Technology
As laid out in the original paper, it’s not at all debatable: it hasn’t been passed. If for no other reason than you’d first have to play “The Imitation Game” a whole bunch of times in order to collect statistics on how often men can successfully imitate women.
The idea is simply that, absent telepathy, you can’t tell the difference between a computer that thinks, and a computer that behaves as if it thinks. All you ever really have from a super complex system is what you can observe from the outside, so let’s observe the computer in conversation, lying.
It probably says something that led Turing figured “lying” was the most human of activities and the best one to test for when trying to see if a computer was thinking like a human.
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