The Turing Test: Verbal Behavior as the Hallmark of Intelligence
(Paperback)
Publishing Details
The Turing Test: Verbal Behavior as the Hallmark of Intelligence
By (Author) Stuart M. Shieber
MIT Press Ltd
Bradford Books
18th June 2004
United States
Classifications
Professional and Scholarly
Non Fiction
Cognition and cognitive psychology
006.3
Physical Properties
Paperback
336
Width 152mm, Height 229mm, Spine 19mm
499g
Description
The Turing Test is part of the vocabulary of popular culture - it has appeared in works ranging from the Broadway play "Breaking the Code" to the comic strip "Robotman". The writings collected by Shieber for this book examine the profound philosophical issues surrounding the Turing Test as a criterion for intelligence. Alan Turing's idea, originally expressed in a 1950 paper titled "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" and published in the journal "Mind", proposed an "indistinguishabliity test" that compared artifact and person. Following Descartes' dictum that it is the ability to speak that distinguishes human from beast, Turing proposed to test whether machine and person were indistinguishable in regard 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 proposed thought experiment encapsulates the issues that the writings in this volume define and discuss. The first section of the book contains writing by philosophical precursors, including Descartes, who first proposed the idea of indistinguishability tests. 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. The final section opens with responses to Turing's paper published in "Mind" soon after the paper first appeared. The bulk of this section, however, consists of papers from a broad spectrum of scholars in the fields that directly address the issue of the Turing Test as a test of intelligence.
Reviews
...a fabulous collection of essays that address the much-debated Turing Test as a criterion for intelligence and discusses the future possibilities of artificial intelligence (AI) in society.
* Biology Digest *Author Bio
Stuart M. Shieber is Harvard College Professor and James O. Welch, Jr. and Virginia B. Welch Professor of Computer Science, Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences, at Harvard University.
