Rethinking Turing’s Test and the Philosophical Implications

© 2020, Springer Nature B.V. In the 70 years since Alan Turing’s ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence’ appeared in Mind, there have been two widely-accepted interpretations of the Turing test: the canonical behaviourist interpretation and the rival inductive or epistemic interpretation. These readings are based on Turing’s Mind paper; few seem aware that Turing described two other versions of the imitation game. I have argued that both readings are inconsistent with Turing’s 1948 and 1952 statements about intelligence, and fail to explain the design of his game. I argue instead for a response-dependence interpretation (Proudfoot 2013). This interpretation has implications for Turing’s view of free will: I argue that Turing’s writings suggest a new form of free will compatibilism, which I call response-dependence compatibilism (Proudfoot 2017a). The philosophical implications of rethinking Turing’s test go yet further. It is assumed by numerous theorists that Turing anticipated the computational theory of mind. On the contrary, I argue, his remarks on intelligence and free will lead to a new objection to computationalism

Video CAPTCHAs: Usability vs. Security

A Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computer and Humans Apart (CAPTCHA) is a variation of the Turing test, in which a challenge is used to distinguish humans from computers (‘bots’) on the internet. They are commonly used to prevent the abuse of online services; for example, malicious users have written automated programs that sign up for thousands of free email accounts and send SPAM messages. A number of hard artificial intelligence problems, including natural language processing, speech recognition, character recognition, and image understanding, have been used as the basis for these challenges on the expectation that humans will outperform bots. The most common type of CAPTCHA requires a user to transcribe distorted characters displayed within a noisy image. Unfortunately, many users find CAPTCHAs based on character-recognition frustrating and attack success rates as high as 60% have been reported for Microsoft’s Hotmail CAPTCHA [8].To address these problems, we present a first attempt at using content-based video labeling (‘tagging’) as a the basis for a CAPTCHA

The Annotation Game: On Turing (1950) on Computing, Machinery, and Intelligence

This quote/commented critique of Turing's classical paper suggests that Turing meant -- or should have meant -- the robotic version of the Turing Test (and not just the email version). Moreover, any dynamic system (that we design and understand) can be a candidate, not just a computational one. Turing also dismisses the other-minds problem and the mind/body problem too quickly. They are at the heart of both the problem he is addressing and the solution he is proposing

Learning, Social Intelligence and the Turing Test - why an "out-of-the-box" Turing Machine will not pass the Turing Test

The Turing Test (TT) checks for human intelligence, rather than any putative general intelligence. It involves repeated interaction requiring learning in the form of adaption to the human conversation partner. It is a macro-level post-hoc test in contrast to the definition of a Turing Machine (TM), which is a prior micro-level definition. This raises the question of whether learning is just another computational process, i.e. can be implemented as a TM. Here we argue that learning or adaption is fundamentally different from computation, though it does involve processes that can be seen as computations. To illustrate this difference we compare (a) designing a TM and (b) learning a TM, defining them for the purpose of the argument. We show that there is a well-defined sequence of problems which are not effectively designable but are learnable, in the form of the bounded halting problem. Some characteristics of human intelligence are reviewed including it's: interactive nature, learning abilities, imitative tendencies, linguistic ability and context-dependency. A story that explains some of these is the Social Intelligence Hypothesis. If this is broadly correct, this points to the necessity of a considerable period of acculturation (social learning in context) if an artificial intelligence is to pass the TT. Whilst it is always possible to 'compile' the results of learning into a TM, this would not be a designed TM and would not be able to continually adapt (pass future TTs). We conclude three things, namely that: a purely "designed" TM will never pass the TT; that there is no such thing as a general intelligence since it necessary involves learning; and that learning/adaption and computation should be clearly distinguished.Comment: 10 pages, invited talk at Turing Centenary Conference CiE 2012, special session on "The Turing Test and Thinking Machines