The Turing test

The Turing test

Subject: Science and Tech

Section: Computers

• A test to determine whether machines can impersonate human beings
• The Turing test, named after British mathe­matician Alan Turing, was a concept proposed to test if a machine could deceive a per­son into thinking it was human.
• The hypothesis Turing proposed that an objective way to test for intelligence in machines is to have a com­puter perform a task in the same way a real person would.
• What Turing proposed was the equivalent of a ‘party game’ wherein a man and woman would go into separate rooms and answer, in writing, questions posed by guests.
• The aim of the game was for the man and the woman to convince the guests that they were the other.
• Passing the Turing test would mean that com­puters were able to convince people they were human.

The results

• Since then, at various points, machines have superficially passed the test.
• The earliest was a program called ELIZA, created at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology by Joseph Weizenbaum in the 1960s. ELIZA, was a chatbot modeled on a psychotherapist.
• The Loebner Prize is a competition that has provided a platform for practical Turing tests. A panel of judges awarded prizes for the program that came closest to imitating hu­man like conversation.