Gadgetory

the cheering test created by pioneering computer scientist Alan Turing comes up a lot in sci-fi culture and discussions about intelligent robots but what exactly is the Turing test and what does it mean if a computer passes it Alan cheering first described what we call the Turing test in a 1950 paper cheering wanted to answer the question can machines think to get to the bottom of this he devised a hypothetical test imagine a game with three players one player the interrogator is isolated from the other two players one of whom is human and one of whom is a computer the interrogators job is to try and figure out which is the human and which is the computer by asking questions of both to make things harder the computer is trying to make the interrogator guess wrongly in other words it's trying to be as indistinguishable from a human as possible if more often than not the interrogator is unable to determine computer from human then hey maybe we're dealing with a thinking computer attempts to build computers that can fool humans have revealed some fascinating challenges for instance it's hard to make a computer that's good at telling jokes the Turing test isn't a perfect test of robot intelligence for example it encourages trickery one recent attempt involved a program pretending to be a young boy for whom English wasn't a first language conveniently covering up any linguistic slips the Turing test also doesn't account for non-human intelligence some of the smartest computers around today have no chance of pretending to be a person but that doesn't make the advances in AI that they represent any less impressive so just because a computer looks like his pass the Turing test doesn't mean we have to bow down to our robot overlords just yet but nevertheless cheering's experiment gives us plenty to think about in terms of how we define intelligent behavior and what we would want from an intelligent robot and after all who doesn't like thinking about robots you