Personality

It's what I said all the time. The judges should be judged!

Obviously the Turing test in it's original form is extreemly limited. It also doesn't count animals as intelligent, for example. However, the basic point that he was making wasn't so much about the mechanics of the test. Rather he was saying that if it looks like intelligence from the outside, then it is intelligent, regardless of what the inside looks like.

Turing never claimed his test was the ONLY way of determining intelligence, just that passing it would prove intelligence. I'm sure he would have thought that both animals and aliens had intelligence. They would just be bad subjects to take the test.

But that test is a bit like deciding if something is alive or not by saying: "If it looks alive, then it's alive." Then, artificial flowers would be alive. I'm not convinced.

The main reason that the test was supposed to be text-only was that this was only a little after the second world war. Computers certainly didn't have hands or eyes or stuff then. Also, I'm not sure what we would have thought of the computer beating Kasparov. I mean, we know that it was done by brute force, but according to Kasparov, it really looked like the computer knew what it was doing.

It's more difficult to open up the brain of an alien to decide whether it's alive. You have to base it off of the outside

I think it's OK to try to decide it from the outside. I'm just against vague criteria like "if it looks like it is, then it is."

I think defining intelligence is a very interesting question. My definition would be that it's the capacity of solving general problems. That could be determined from the outside, presenting problems to the bot/alien/creature. Deep Blue, who defeated Kasparov, could certainly solve chess problems, but nothing else. I think that's too limited to consider it true intelligence. Our bots don't even know the simplest rules of logic, so you couldn't call them intelligent, even if one of them can fool a human for half an hour.

We're forgetting the true question put forth by Turing. It was this: 'Can machines think?' Turing invented the test specifically to define the word 'think' (as it pertains to machines), not 'intelligence.'

Fooling a human for half an hour is many times easier than fooling a human who is specifically administering the Turing test for a mere two minutes.

The biggest problem with the Turing test is that it will rule out any machine who does not think as a human thinks. Or one that spits out words faster than a human can.

*puts on glasses and looks up* Yep, this is way over my head.

And yes Butterfly Dream, I'll make sure that doesn't happen again.

I always thought that "intelligence" and "capacity to think" were more or less the same thing. If you believe it's something different, please explain what's the difference.

What is exactly "administering the Turing test", anyway? I always thought it was supposed to be just chatting with the bots.

It originally came from a game where a man and a woman would write messages to a third person, and that person would try and guess who was who. The man could pretend to be a woman, and visa versa. Turing thought that this game could be used on computers, and if the computer could succesfully trick the other person, it was to all intents and purposes intelligent.