How does the Turing test work, and why is it still debatable whether it has been passed or not?
In: Technology
The Turing test is not a real test so it doesn’t really “work” in any way. It’s based on a weird game that bored British people used to play, called “the imitation game” (hence the name of the movie), where people would pretend to be of the opposite sex.
In this game, participants can only communicate using written notes and Turing devised a thought experiment analogous to this, but with humans and computers.
Since this was quite a while ago, and people back then had vastly different understandings of computers, the original test as posited by Turing is somewhat different than the modern versions you may have seen. Turing was absolutely an incredible genius and a giant of computer science, but his original idea for the Turing test has a certain naivete and is a bit weird, partly due to what computers were then and partly due to being inspired by that strange game.
The point is, the Turing test is more of a Turing thought experiment and doesn’t really have a rigorous definition or any hard numbers attached to it. It’s not meant to. It’s not intended to actually determine whether an AI is an AI or a person, but it’s meant to ask the question “can machines think?” in a metaphorical way since it was asked at a time where computers were far less understood and developed.
Now, lay people, journalists and storytellers absolutely love the notion of a test meant to tell AI and humans apart and just assume that’s exactly what the Turing test is.
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