gcj%qmc-ori.uucp@CS.UCL.AC.UK (03/20/86)
>From AIList Vol 4 # 56 :- ``: he [Turing] designed it to be nothing more than a philosophical conversation-stopper.'' >From "Turing's Man : Western Culture in the Computer Age", by J. David Bolter :- `` It would be a machine that knew men and women better than they knew themselves. Turing was optimistic about the prospect of this supercomputer : " I believe that in about fifty years' time it will be plausible to programme computers ... to make them play the imitation game so well that an average interregator will not have more than a 70 per cent chance of making the right identification after five minutes of questioning" (Feigenbaum and Feldman, Computers and Thought, 19).'' Since this is not directly quoting from Turing's own work, it cannot be regarded as being the giving the true version of his own hopes for the test. Bolter continues in the next paragraph with :- `` The appeal of Turing's test is easy to understand. It offers an operational defintion of intelligence quite in the spirit of behavioral psychology in the postwar era. A programmer can measure success by statistics - the number of human subjects fooled by the machine.'' Gordon Joly ARPA: gcj%qmc-ori@ucl-cs.arpa UUCP: ...!ukc!qmc-cs!qmc-ori!gcj