Turing suggested we use the same approach when judging computers. If people seem to be thinking, we assume they are. We have no way of knowing what’s going on in their heads. That may sound like an odd thing to assume. If a computer behaves as if it is thinking, he decided, then you can assume it is. Turing’s imitation game was a clever way to get around that problem. A roboticist at Ohio State University, in Columbus, she studies how robots and humans interact. The reason it’s so tricky is that we don’t even understand how people think, says Ayanna Howard. Jimmy Sime/Hulton Archive/Getty Images Plusīut Turing also knew it was hard to show what actually counts as thinking. And Turing believed that such machines would one day become sophisticated enough to truly think. Though never built, Turing’s design led directly to today’s computers. This would be a computer that could do anything asked of it, given the right instructions. But Turing had been working since way back in 1936 on the idea for the first computer that people could program with software. It was a bold question, considering computers as we now know them did not yet exist. He began the paper with these words: “ I propose to consider the question, ‘Can machines think?’” Turing debuted his game idea in a 1950 paper in the journal Mind. Player A’s job is to determine whether B or C is the human. One of those players is human, the other is a computer. The game goes like this: Someone - let’s call this person Player A - sits alone in a room and types messages to two other players. He called it the “imitation game.” Today, we call it the Turing test. Back in 1950, British mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing came up with a way to test whether a machine was truly intelligent. Virtual assistants may be new, but questions about machine intelligence are not. But are these machines truly smart? What would it mean for a computer to be intelligent, anyway? Siri can tell us who won last night’s baseball game - or if it’s likely to rain today. Today, we’re surrounded by so-called smart devices.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |