mark (12/02/82)
Charles Wetherell's description of the Turing test conveys much of the gist, but seems to me to be missing two essential elements. First, you have to picture a game with 3 rooms, containing a man, a woman, and an interrogator, one per room. The interrogator can ask a question of either the man or woman, but via typed messages (or teletypes or whatever) to mask out voice inflections or handwriting. The interrogator (I) knows the participants as X and Y, but does not know which is the man and which is the woman. I's object is to determine which is which. Things are complicated because the man is trying to make C guess wrong. Thus, in answer to "Will X please tell me the length of his or her hair", A might answer "My hair is shingled, and the longest strands are about nine inches long". The woman can say things like "I am the woman, don't listen to him", but so can the man. Now, we do the same thing, only we replace the man with a machine. Now the object is to guess which is the human and which is the machine. The machine is trying to fool I into thinking the machine is a human. A sample dialog is included in Turing's paper: Q: Please write me a sonnet on the subject of the Forth Bridge. A: Count me out on this one. I never could write poetry. Q: Add 34957 to 70764. A: (Pause about 30 secods and then give as answer) 105621. Q: Do you play chess? A: Yes. Q: I have K at my K1, and no other pieces. You have only K at K6 and R at R1. It is your move. What do you play? A: (After a pause of 15 seconds) R-R8 mate.