Moving Beyond the Turing Test

Alan Turing would be 100 years old this year. In 1950 he wrote a seminal paper in which he proposed an operational definition of machine intelligence designed to sidestep the philosophical quagmire of what it means to think.19 Turing proposed pitting a computer against a human in an imitation game. The computer and human are placed in separate rooms and connected by teletype to an external interrogator who can ask any imaginable question of either entity. The computer tries to fool the interrogator into believing it is the human; the human tries to convince the interrogator he or she is the human. If the interrogator cannot distinguish the computer from the person, the computer is judged to be intelligent. This simple test has come to be called the Turing Test. © 2012 ACM 0001-0782/12/12.