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Computing Machinery and Intelligence

Turing, 1950, Computing Machinery and Intelligence (Mind)

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3 cards in “1 The imitation game” · whole deck

1 The imitation game

  1. Why did Turing refuse to answer “Can machines think?” by defining “machine” and “think”?
    Defining them by common usage would make the answer a matter for a statistical survey like a Gallup poll, which he called absurd. Instead he replaced the question with a closely related one in relatively unambiguous words.
  2. Describe the original imitation game.
    Three people: a man (A), a woman (B) and an interrogator (C) in a separate room, who knows them only as X and Y and must decide which is the woman. A tries to make C identify wrongly, B tries to help. Answers are typewritten (ideally by teleprinter) so voices give nothing away.
    interrogator CteleprinterXYA and B
    C must tell which of X, Y is the woman; later a machine plays A
  3. What question replaces “Can machines think?”
    What happens when a machine takes the part of A: will the interrogator decide wrongly as often as when the game is played between a man and a woman?

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