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This leads us to the important principle of investigation that will be our touch-
stone for the acceptance or rejection of an idea. The principle is encapsulated in the
philosophy of C.S. Peirce (1839-1914)—Pragmatism; but is better expressed by his
friend and colleague William James.
The pragmatic method ... is to try to interpret each notion by tracing its respective practical
consequences ... .. Whenever a dispute is serious, we ought to be able to show some practical
difference that must follow from one side or the other's being right.
The issue I wish to explore is that of intelligence. The practical consequence of
this exploration should be a clear enough understanding of intelligence to recognize
its existence in any alien environment, and in particular as it may be exhibited by
artificial devices. This can then lead us to the question, “Can we create an intelligent
machine?”
Alan Turing, in 1950, addresses this question in a more general way. He felt
that the acceptance of a thinking machine was a question of crossing an intellectual
boundary. To ease the way he modified the parlor game (called the imitation game)
thus 3 :
“It ( the imitation game ) is played with three people, a man (A), a woman (B), and an
interrogator (C) who may be of either sex. The interrogator stays in a room apart from the
other two. The object of the game for the interrogator is to determine which of the other two
is the man and which is the woman. He knows them by labels X and Y and at the end of the
game he says either “X is A or Y is B” or “X is B and Y is A”. The interrogator is allowed to
put questions to A and B thus:
C: “Will X please tells me the length of his/her hair?”
Now suppose X is actually A, then A must answer. It is A's objective in the game to try and
cause C to make the wrong identification ... . The objective of the game for the third player
(B) is to help the interrogator.
... . An intermediary can repeat the question and answers.
... . We now ask the question, “What will happen when a machine takes the part of A in this
game?”
Turing goes on to say is:
... . These questions replace our original “Can machines think?”
I interpreted this as:
The original question of gender is now replaced by, “Which one is the machine? If we cannot
tell then we may assume that the machine can think.
The assumption here is that a person displays the thinking process and this process
represents our standard for thinking. The game is intended to introduce us to the idea
that a machine might think; it breaks through a psychological barrier that assumes
thinking is the prerogative if mankind. What is not described is how we might
distinguish this thinking process from any other kind of activity? The real problem,
unstated by Turing, is, “What should be our game plan? What questions should we
ask?”
3
Note that ' ... .' refers to missing text.
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