Turing Test

If you’ve ever been prompted to “enter the word/numbers/phrase you see here in the box below to verify you are not a computer”, you may have been as extremely suspicious as I was the first time, but you definitely have not passed the Turing Test.  In fact, only computers can ‘pass’ the Turing Test since this test is designed to differentiate artificial intelligence from actual intelligence.  Many of us became conscious of Alexander Turing’s contribution to the maintenance of Western society with the movie “The Imitation Game” where Sherlock (I mean, Benedict Cumberbatch) portrayed Turing’s enigmatic conflict and resolution (spoiler alert).  The test that bears his name, however, is rather clever in that the computer trying to leap over the bar of simulating and emulating human behavior must not only exhibit intelligent human responses, but also unintelligent human behavior (perhaps, of which, the majority of our existence seems to exhibit), and even have the ability to not appear TOO intelligent, that is, not being able to compute the multiplication of two seven digit numbers instantaneously (unless you are ‘Rain Man’ or ‘Matilda’).  Some computers are ‘intelligent’ enough to actually pass a good number of the tests such that the ‘blind’ experimenter cannot distinguish whether the unit responding to prompts on the other side of the wall is a computer or a person.  Imagine if both your friend and Siri responded to a question you asked in Siri’s voice…could you tell the difference?  You would have to think of a certain subset of questions to distinguish – perhaps an inside joke, but a history question will not do, as Siri has access to the internet and thereby knows what animals Hannibal rode over the Alps, as where your friend may not.  Computers may only – and may ever only – be as good as their programmers, but we are rather clever deceivers ourselves.  A string of ‘0’s and 1’s’ can’t actually lie or deceive, but they can do a pretty crafty job of imitating liars and deceivers.