The Turing test
- June 2, 2022
- Posted by: OptimizeIAS Team
- Category: DPN Topics
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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.