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Crab Nebula

The Turing Test

By Yuki Wang '23

The Turing Test

As a mathematician and computer scientist, Alan Turing made several well-known inventions and one of them is the discovery of the Turing Test in 1950. Its principle is to let a person conduct a conversation with a computer (without knowing that they are speaking to a computer) and ask the computer a few questions. If, in a certain period of time, they cannot judge whether the other side is a person or a computer, then this computer is considered to have similar intelligence with human beings, which means that it successfully passes the Turing Test.

Can Siri pass the Turing Test? Probably not. So far, Siri only works with simple sentences and short phrases and is unable to carry out a full-blown conversation, which is easily identified, and it doesn’t feel completely human. According to Peter Nowak of Maclean’s, “Siri is more of a programmed robot than a thinking entity.” In the future, this might change, but for now, Siri ultimately fails.

Cleverbot, with its unique feature of learning from the conversations with human beings, was created by British scientist Rollo Carpenter and was launched in 1997. It passed the Turing Test on September 3, 2011. However, Carpenter responds to this fact by saying that Cleverbot is not actually thinking and that one should distinguish thinking from the word intelligence, showing a huge difference between Cleverbot and another human.

Back to the Turing Test itself, while it appears to be the ultimate test of human and machine, it has almost lost its worth. As Carpenter says, it is a test to imitate intelligence, not a test of intelligence itself. As we continue down the path, we, human beings, need much time to spend until AI systems become legitimately intelligent.

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