On 2/1/2015 12:23 AM, LizR wrote:
On 1 February 2015 at 13:59, John Clark <johnkcl...@gmail.com
<mailto:johnkcl...@gmail.com>> wrote:
On Sat, Jan 31, 2015 at 5:24 PM, LizR <lizj...@gmail.com
<mailto:lizj...@gmail.com>>
wrote:
> I must admit I have never been able to see much point in the TT,
So if it's not behavior how do you tell the difference between smart people
and
stupid people?
In that case it's behaviour. But Turing's question was "can a machine think?" and I
don't see that the TT can give a definite answer. To quote the film (roughly), a machine
will not think like a person does, so trying to see whether the machine can fool you
into thinking it's a person isn't telling you anything terribly useful, or at least
nothing useful about whether the machine is thinking. (As we know, ELIZA can fool people
into thinking it's thinking, while other people don't see becoming chess champion of the
world as proof of thought.)
There's ambiguity even in the question, "Can a machine think?" I'd say thinking consist
in taking in information and using it to act so as to meet some goal? And in that sense
even quite simple machines can think. But then most people want to include intelligence,
which I'd say requires learning from experience and is much more that just "thinking".
And then there's consciousness, which everybody (presumably) knows what it is, but nobody
knows how to test for - and I think that's what Turing was proposing: a test for
consciousness. And I agree it's far from definitive. However it's usually misstated.
Turing proposed that a person would communicate in writing with two imitators. One would
be the machine in question which would pretend to be woman. The other would be a man who
would pretend to be a woman. So they both were playing an imitation game.
Brent
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