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From: bohm@cs.Buffalo.EDU (Eric "Gothmog" Bohm)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Turing Test: opinions on an idea
Message-ID: <76933@eerie.acsu.Buffalo.EDU>
Date: 17 May 91 14:38:00 GMT
References: <1991May15.055331.10631@cs.ubc.ca> <53693@nigel.ee.udel.edu> <1991May16.143804.16487@msuinfo.cl.msu.edu> <1991May17.064714.5942@latcs2.lat.oz.au>
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In article <1991May17.064714.5942@latcs2.lat.oz.au>, jane@latcs2.lat.oz.au (Jane Philcox) writes:
|> Huh?  I've only heard of the test as a test of intelligence.  Have I missed
|> something somewhere?  Was it originally a test to see whether you could tell
|> males from females, and then later adapted to the intelligence area?
|> 
|> References, someone?


	Here is how Charniak and McDermott describe the situation in 
_Introduction to Artificial Intelligence_. pg 10
"After the war, in 1950, he published the famous article "Computing Machinery
ad Intelligence " [Turing63] in which he explictly puts forward the idea that a computer could be programmed to as to exhibit intelligent behavior. He also 
examines, and rejects, arguments as to the impossibility of artificial
intelligence But probably the most famous contributions of the article is the so-called 'Turing Test'. Turing envisions a test in which you have typewriter
communication to two rooms, one of which has a man in it and one of which has a 
woman. Both that man and the woman would claim to be a woman, and it would be your problem to decide which was telling the truth. Similarly, Turing suggests
we could have a person in one room and a computer in the other, both claiming to
be a person, and you would have to decide on the truth. Obviously, if you failed at this task (or could only guess at chance level), then one would be inclined 
to say that the computer was intelligent, the alternative being out of the
question in polite company. (Actually, the paper makes it sound as if Turing
had in mind the computer pretending to be a woman in the man/woman game, but
the point is not completely clear, and most have assumed that he intended the
test to be a person/computer one, and not woman/computer.)"

	Sorry I didn't go back to the original source, but the book was right by
the terminal.(not a bad book incidentally, I like the polite company jab :-)

	I have heard similar reports on the lack of clarity about the test
from others, so I guess we'll never know exactly what Alan Turing had in mind. 
Although it looks like he was envisioning a typical 3 way send or talk session
of modern times, with a computer at one end and a people at the other ends.






-- 
Gothmog AKA Eric Bohm
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