Robotics Reference
In-Depth Information
top human players are sometimes able to tell, from an occasional “typical
computer move”, that their opponent's brain is made of silicon. Does
this negate the programs' performances with respect to the Turing Test?
I think not. After all, if a conversational program were occasionally to
use poor grammar in communicating with a human competition judge,
would that necessarily give the game away? Humans too are perfectly
capable of making grammatical mistakes.
Since Turing's 1950 paper was published, the Turing Test has had
its fair share of criticism as a yardstick of intelligence in computer pro-
grams. The test's critics have put forward various reasons why the test is
inadequate for demonstrating AI, and they have often suggested “better”
alternative tests, but it is far from clear that any of these alternatives ac-
tually proposes a better goal for research in AI than is set by the Turing
Test itself.
It is sometimes suggested that the Turing Test was anticipated some
300 years earlier by Rene Descartes, one of the most important Western
philosophers of the past few centuries and often referred to as the “father”
of modern philosophy. In an essay of 1637, “Discourse on the Right
Method for Conducting one's Reason and Discovering the Truth in the
Sciences”, Descartes wrote
If there were machines which bore a resemblance to our bodies and
imitated our actions as closely as possible for all practical purposes,
we should still have two very certain means of recognizing that they
were not real men. The first is that they could never use words, or
put together signs, as we do in order to declare our thoughts to
others. For we can certainly conceive of a machine so constructed
that it utters words, and even utters words that correspond to bod-
ily actions causing a change in its organs (for example, if you touch
it in one spot it asks what you want of it, if you touch it in another
it cries out that you are hurting it, and so on). But it is not conceiv-
able that such a machine should produce different arrangements of
words so as to give an appropriately meaningful answer to what-
ever is said in its presence, as the dullest of men can do. Secondly,
even though some machines might do some things as well as we do
them, or perhaps even better, they would inevitably fail in others,
which would reveal that they are acting not from understanding,
but only from the disposition of their organs. For whereas reason is
a universal instrument, which can be used in all kinds of situations,
these organs need some particular action; hence it is for all practical
purposes impossible for a machine to have enough different organs
