Turing test (redirected from Turing tests)

Turing test, a procedure to test whether a computer is capable of humanlike thought. As proposed (1950) by the British mathematician Alan Turing, a person (the interrogator) sits with a teletype machine isolated from two correspondents—one is another person, one is a computer. By asking questions through the teletype and studying the responses, the interrogator tries to determine which correspondent is human and which is the computer. The computer is programmed to give deceptive answers, e.g., when asked to add two numbers together, the computer pauses slightly before giving the incorrect sum—to imitate what a human might do, the computer gives an incorrect answer slowly since the interrogator would expect the machine to give the correct answer quickly. If it proves impossible for the interrogator to discriminate between the human and the computer, the computer is credited with having passed the test.

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Turing test

Test proposed by Alan M. Turing to determine whether a computer can be said to “think.” Turing suggested the “imitation game,” wherein a remote human interrogator, within a fixed time frame, must distinguish between a computer and a human subject based on their replies to questions posed by the interrogator. A series of such tests would measure the computer's success at “thinking” by the probability of its being misidentified as the human subject. The test is performed today in competitions that test the success of artificial intelligence.

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The "acid test" of true artificial intelligence, as defined by the English scientist Alan Turing. In the 1940s, he said "a machine has artificial intelligence when there is no discernible difference between the conversation generated by the machine and that of an intelligent person." See CAPTCHA.

Alan Mathison Turing

One of the pioneers in computing, Turing helped fellow scientists break Germany's Enigma encryption code in World War II. In 1954, barely reaching the age of 42, Turing died of a self-administered dose of potassium cyanide, the motivation for which was unclear. (Image courtesy of The Computer History Museum, www.computerhistory.org)

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(artificial intelligence)

Turing test - A criterion proposed by Alan Turing in 1950 for deciding whether a computer is intelligent. Turing called it "the Imitation Game" and offered it as a replacement for the question, "Can machines think?" A human holds a written conversation on any topic with an unseen correspondent (nowadays it might be by electronic mail or chat). If the human believes he is talking to another human when he is really talking to a computer then the computer has passed the Turing test and is deemed to be intelligent. Turing predicted that within 50 years (by the year 2000) technological progress would produce computing machines with a capacity of 10**9 bits, and that with such machinery, a computer program would be able to fool the average questioner for 5 minutes about 70% of the time. The Loebner Prize is a competition to find a computer program which can pass an unrestricted Turing test. Julia is a program that attempts to pass the Turing test. See also AI-complete. Turing's paper.