What is the Turing Test?
Why are we concerned with the Turing Test? Understanding the Turing Test has been important to prove if we can build machines that think. Intelligence is not an enigma.
In 1950, Alan Turing developed a test to test a machine’s ability to exhibit intelligent behavior that is similar to that of a human. He wrote a famous paper “Could a computer think?“.
To summarize the paper, Turing had an idea of the imitation game where an interrogator interrogates a computer and a human under conditions such that the interrogator would not know which was which. The communication would be entirely by means of textual messages. If the interrogator could not figure out who is who by questioning, it would be reasonable to call the computer intelligent, because we judge other people’s intelligence from external observation.
Turing did not consider the idea of consciousness in the imitation game. The imitation game is the Turing Test.
Limitation of The Turing Test
The important thing to remember in the test is that the test will be conducted under specific conditions. So we are talking about constraints here.
The interrogator will ask the questions that are either Yes or No questions or questions related to a subject. This is the drawback of the Turing Test. If an interrogator asks an open-ended question, it’s very less likely a machine can fool a human. The human knowledge and intelligence are vast, a human can determine or make crucial decisions on the moment’s notice. It’s not the same for a machine.
Machines can do many tasks swiftly and brilliantly, even better than humans. But to do those tasks, they are only using what they have been provided – input or machine parts. A drawback of this argument we are limiting what we consider the machine as. Computers, humans are not the only machines.
Objections
Over the years, there have been a variety of objections to Turing’s theory.
The “Heads in the sand” objection states that if there are thinking machines, then there are machines with comparable thinking ability. It also says that humans considered themselves the smartest animals, but with thinking machines, that wouldn’t be true.
There are also mathematical objections based on Gödel’s first incompleteness theorem and Turing’s The Halting Problem.
First incompleteness theorem
Any consistent formal system within which a certain amount of elementary arithmetic can be carried out is incomplete; i.e., there are statements of the language of which can neither be proved nor disproved in
Based on this theorem, if there is a machine that can think, then we should be able to prove that there is a machine that can not think. Also if there is a machine that can not think, then there is a machine that can think. We should be able to prove both of these statements in a system that is complete and inconsistent. But if it is inconsistent system, then it can’t be a consistent system, as a result disproving the theorem.
Then there is a consciousness objection. Humans feel the emotions and those emotions drive humans to do various activities, like create art, write a poem. Can machines do that? If it is true, then machines have brains. Can machines similarly feel pain, sadness, or joy? The issue with this objection is that it assumes that there are not intelligent animals or organisms in space. Our knowledge of space is limited. We don’t know if there is intelligent life outside in space.
The famous objection comes from Ada Lovelace.
The Analytical Engine has no pretensions to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform
In short, it says machines will do only those things that we know how to do and how we can order machines to do.
The Turing Test in Science Fiction
In reality, proving the Turing Test has been harder. But science fiction has already made progress with familiar tropes. 2001: A Space Odyssey where HAL9000 becomes intelligent. Terminator where Skynet becomes smart enough to destroy humanity. These movies show the dangerous side of AI in the future. Ex-Machina showed the machine that goes through the Turing Test. The flaw in the movie was the judge already knew which one was the machine. Blade Runner did a better job by applying a Voight-Kampf test to differentiate between humans and replicants.
The Turing Test is important, whether in reality or science fiction. Eventually, we will need a way to distinguish humans and machines.
References
- The Turing Test – Stanford