Popular conception of the “Turing Test” is pretty inaccurate. What Turing proposed was a way of determining if a computer is thinking or doing something equivalent to thinking.
His test was not for consciousness and it was not simply chatting with a computer to see if it could convince you that it is a person.
What Turing proposed was called the Imitation Game.
I’ve modernized it a little but the premise is the same. Think of a game show where there are 3 people all claiming to be a brain surgeon but only one of them really is. You get to ask all three people questions and if one can trick you into thinking they are the real brain surgeon when they are not, they win.
Turing basically said that if a computer could play this game as well as any of the humans pretending to the brain surgeon, it must be doing something equivalent to thinking.
Popular conception of the “Turing Test” is pretty inaccurate. What Turing proposed was a way of determining if a computer is thinking or doing something equivalent to thinking.
His test was not for consciousness and it was not simply chatting with a computer to see if it could convince you that it is a person.
What Turing proposed was called the Imitation Game.
I’ve modernized it a little but the premise is the same. Think of a game show where there are 3 people all claiming to be a brain surgeon but only one of them really is. You get to ask all three people questions and if one can trick you into thinking they are the real brain surgeon when they are not, they win.
Turing basically said that if a computer could play this game as well as any of the humans pretending to the brain surgeon, it must be doing something equivalent to thinking.