Turing test

The Turing test is a proposal for a test of a machine's capability to perform human-like conversation. Described by Alan Turing in the 1950 paper "Computing machinery and intelligence", it proceeds as follows: a human judge engages in a natural language conversation with two other parties, one a human and the other a machine; if the judge cannot reliably tell which is which, then the machine is said to pass the test. It is assumed that both the human and the machine try to appear human. In order to keep the test setting simple and universal (to explicitly test the linguistic capability of some machine), the conversation is usually limited to a text-only channel such as a teletype machine as Turing suggested or, more recently, IRC.

Terminology

In Turing's paper, the term "Imitation Game" is used for his proposed test as well as the party game for men and women. The name "Turing test" may have been invented, and was certainly publicized, by Arthur C. Clarke in the science-fiction novel ' (1968), where it is applied to the computer HAL 9000.

Related Topics:
Arthur C. Clarke - Science-fiction - Novel - 1968 - HAL 9000

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

A modification of the Turing test, where the objective or one or more of the roles have been reversed between computers and humans, is termed a reverse Turing test.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~