TURING TEST: VERBAL BEHAVIOR A

The Turing Test is part of the vocabulary of popular culture -- it hasappeared in works ranging from the Broadway play "Breaking the Code" to the comicstrip "Robotman." The writings collected by Stuart Shieber for this book examine theprofound philosophical issues surrounding the Turing Test as a criterion forintelligence. Alan Turing's idea, originally expressed in a 1950 paper titled"Computing Machinery and Intelligence" and published in the journal Mind, proposedan "indistinguishability test" that compared artifact and person. FollowingDescartes's dictum that it is the ability to speak that distinguishes human frombeast, Turing proposed to test whether machine and person were indistinguishable inregard to verbal ability. He was not, as is often assumed, answering the question"Can machines think?" but proposing a more concrete way to ask it. Turing's proposedthought experiment encapsulates the issues that the writings in The Turing Testdefine and discuss.The first section of the book contains writings by philosophicalprecursors, including Descartes, who first proposed the idea of indistinguishablitytests. The second section contains all of Turing's writings on the Turing Test, including not only the Mind paper but also less familiar ephemeral material. Thefinal section opens with responses to Turing's paper published in Mind soon after itfirst appeared. The bulk of this section, however, consists of papers from a broadspectrum of scholars in the field that directly address the issue of the Turing Testas a test for intelligence. Contributors include John R. Searle, Ned Block, DanielC. Dennett, and Noam Chomsky (in a previously unpublished paper). Each chapter isintroduced by background material that can also be read as a self-contained essay onthe Turing Test.