🚀 go-pugleaf

Friends, go back and read Turing's paper again.  It was a semi-technical
(or perhaps non-technical) speculation on whether machines might ever be
able to think -- and how we might be able to tell if they do so.  Turing
described something he called the Artificial Game in which a man, a
woman, and an arbiter communicate by teletype.  The arbiter cannot see
either of the players, but they select between themselves which shall be
required to tell the truth and which be permitted to lie.  Then both
try through conversation and Q and A to convince the arbiter that they
are of the gender of the truth-teller.  It might well be the case that
over a broad selection of players and arbiters, there ought to be
reliable statistics of the relative success of the truth-teller and
liar.  (At least within a group of similar age, education level, social
class, nationality, etc.)


Now, program a computer to "be intelligent" and give it "experience"
sufficient to play the Artificial Game, replacing gender with human/
machine as the deciding factor.  (I.e. sometimes the human will be the
liar, sometimes the computer.)  Turing POSITED that if the win/loss
statistics for the human-computer game match those of the man-woman game
then the computer might be said to "think." Bias has nothing to do with
the test as it is statistical.  Given a large enough sample of games
played, individual bias can be made insignificant.

Please note that Turing was not stating that a machine winning the game
would be intelligent; rather he pointed to one whose win/loss
statistics were commensurate to those of a human.

My library is in transit so I can't check the original text of the
paper.  I believe, however that an equally valid interpretation of the
"Turing Test" is to leave the game roles alone but just change the
players.  That is, now a man or woman plays one side, a computer the
other.  The goal, however, is still gender, not origin.  I like this
formulation better.

Note also that the focus of the paper was methodology, not method.
There's a big difference in that.

-- 
--Dick Wexelblat (rwex@ida.org)
  703  324  5511 (Formerly: rlw@philabs.philps.com)