Online research in philosophy

Stuart M. Shieber’s name is well known to computational linguists for his research and to computer scientists more generally for his debate on the Loebner Turing Test competition, which appeared a decade earlier in Communications of the ACM (Shieber 1994a, 1994b; Loebner 1994).¹ With this collection, I expect it to become equally well known to philosophers.

The Turing Test, originally proposed as a simple operational definition of intelligence, has now been with us for exactly half a century. It is safe to say that no other single article in computer science, and few other articles in science in general, have generated so much discussion. The present article chronicles the comments and controversy surrounding Turing's classic article from its publication to the present. The changing perception of the Turing Test over the last fifty years has paralleled the changing attitudes in the scientific community towards artificial intelligence: from the unbridled optimism of 1960's to the current realization of the immense difficulties that still lie ahead. I conclude with the prediction that the Turing Test will remain important, not only as a landmark in the history of the development of intelligent machines, but also with real relevance to future generations of people living in a world in which the cognitive capacities of machines will be vastly greater than they are now.

The main factor of intelligence is defined as the ability tocomprehend, formalising this ability with the help of new constructsbased on descriptional complexity. The result is a comprehension test,or C-test, which is exclusively defined in computational terms. Due toits absolute and non-anthropomorphic character, it is equally applicableto both humans and non-humans. Moreover, it correlates with classicalpsychometric tests, thus establishing the first firm connection betweeninformation theoretical notions and traditional IQ tests. The TuringTest is compared with the C-test and the combination of the two isquestioned. In consequence, the idea of using the Turing Test as apractical test of intelligence should be surpassed, and substituted bycomputational and factorial tests of different cognitive abilities, amuch more useful approach for artificial intelligence progress and formany other intriguing questions that present themselves beyond theTuring Test.

No computer that had not experienced the world as we humans had could pass a rigorously administered standard Turing Test. We show that the use of “subcognitive” questions allows the standard Turing Test to indirectly probe the human subcognitive associative concept network built up over a lifetime of experience with the world. Not only can this probing reveal differences in cognitive abilities, but crucially, even differences in _physical aspects_ of the candidates can be detected. Consequently, it is unnecessary to propose even harder versions of the Test in which all physical and behavioral aspects of the two candidates had to be indistinguishable before allowing the machine to pass the Test. Any machine that passed the “simpler” symbols- in/symbols-out test as originally proposed by Turing would be intelligent. The problem is that, even in its original form, the Turing Test is already too hard and too anthropocentric for any machine that was not a physical, social, and behavioral carbon copy of ourselves to actually pass it. Consequently, the Turing Test, even in its standard version, is not a reasonable test for general machine intelligence. There is no need for an even stronger version of the Test.

The Turing Test is one of the most disputed topics in artificial intelligence, philosophy of mind, and cognitive science. This paper is a review of the past 50 years of the Turing Test. Philo- sophical debates, practical developments and repercussions in related disciplines are all covered. We discuss Turing’s ideas in detail and present the important comments that have been made on them. Within this context, behaviorism, consciousness, the ‘other minds’ problem, and similar topics in philosophy of mind are discussed. We also cover the sociological and psychological aspects of the Turing Test. Finally, we look at the current situation and analyze programs that have been developed with the aim of passing the Turing Test. We conclude that the Turing Test has been, and will continue to be, an influential and controversial topic.

This commentary attempts to show that the inverted Turing Test (Watt 1996) could be simulated by a standard Turing test and, most importantly, claims that a very simple program with no intelligence whatsoever could be written that would pass the inverted Turing test. For this reason, the inverted Turing test in its present form must be rejected.

The Turing Test is one of the most disputed topics in artificial intelligence, philosophy of mind, and cognitive science. This paper is a review of the past 50 years of the Turing Test. Philosophical debates, practical developments and repercussions in related disciplines are all covered. We discuss Turing''s ideas in detail and present the important comments that have been made on them. Within this context, behaviorism, consciousness, the `other minds'' problem, and similar topics in philosophy of mind are discussed. We also cover the sociological and psychological aspects of the Turing Test. Finally, we look at the current situation and analyze programs that have been developed with the aim of passing the Turing Test. We conclude that the Turing Test has been, and will continue to be, an influential and controversial topic.

In Part V of his Discourse on the Method, Descartes introduces a test for distinguishing people from machines that is similar to the one proposed much later by Alan Turing. The Cartesian test combines two distinct elements that Keith Gunderson has labeled the language test and the action test. Though traditional interpretation holds that the action test attempts to determine whether an agent is acting upon principles, I argue that the action test is best understood as a test of common sense. I also maintain that this interpretation yields a stronger test than Turing's, and that contemporary artificial intelligence should consider using it as a guide for future research.

Turing''s test has been much misunderstood. Recently unpublished material by Turing casts fresh light on his thinking and dispels a number of philosophical myths concerning the Turing test. Properly understood, the Turing test withstands objections that are popularly believed to be fatal.

The test Turing proposed for machine intelligence is usually understood to be a test of whether a computer can fool a human into thinking that the computer is a human. This standard interpretation is rejected in favor of a test based on the Imitation Game introduced by Turing at the beginning of "Computing Machinery and Intelligence.".