April 9th, 2015

Magpie Lab

Classwork: Activity 4
Responses to Transform Statements

The Turing Test: Computing Machinery and Intelligence

As Stevan Harnad notes, the question has become “Can machines do what we (as thinking entities) can do?” In other words, Turing is no longer asking whether a machine can “think”; he is asking whether a machine can act indistinguishably from the way a thinker acts.

2014 University of Reading competition
On 7 June 2014 a Turing test competition, organized by Huma Shah and Kevin Warwick to mark the 60th anniversary of Turing’s death, was held at the Royal Society London and was won by the Russian chatter bot Eugene Goostman. The bot, during a series of five-minute-long text conversations, convinced 33% of the contest’s judges that it was human. Judges included John Sharkey, a sponsor of the bill granting a government pardon to Turing, AI Professor Aaron Sloman and Red Dwarf actor Robert Llewellyn.

The competition’s organisers believed that the Turing test had been “passed for the first time” at the event, saying that “some will claim that the Test has already been passed.

Homework: Finish the activity.