How does the Turing test work, and why is it still debatable whether it has been passed or not?
In: Technology
There is no one “Turing test”. To understand why people talk about it, quick history lesson.
At the time computers were being envisioned by early pioneers, we had this idea that machines should be able to do computations. But what is computation? Multiple people, among them Turing, had their own idea of how to rigorously define what is computation, to have this theoretical background that makes sure computers can do any computation. Turing machine was Turing’s answer to this, and they formulated cool Turing-Churchill conjecture saying that yeah, this Turing machine idea probably encapsulates what we mean by computation.
Anyway, in this world where people are trying to define what computation even means, people wanted to know if these computation machines could think. And lots of philosophical debates started. What does thinking even mean, how do you detect presence of thought, is human brain uniquely capable of thought…
And Turing came up with this simple test to direct people towards something practical instead: if you cannot tell the difference between words produced by a computer that may or may not think, and words produced by a human, does it matter if computer thinks or not? From your point of view, it shouldn’t matter. So Turing simply proposed, lets test that then to see if computer thinks, if you can tell the difference.
For the most part, Turing test obviously has not been passed. You cannot have free-form discussion with a computer without illusion of thought shattering quickly. But if you restrict the test or scope of questions or length of interaction, you can get fairly good results for computer. And the thing is, there is no One True Turing Test. Turing test is an idea about testing humans and their ability to differentiate computers from humans rather than trying to assess computer thought directly. It doesn’t have one set of rules, you can do tests in that spirit in multitude of ways, and people have done so. All that matters is that ultimately a human is tasked to tell the difference between a human(that presumably is capable of thought) and a computer(the supposed ‘unknown’) from their output alone.
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