The Turing Test

Well, last time I spoke about how the Fermi Paradox irritated me. I’m on a curmudgeonly roll. Since it’s in the news, let’s go gunning for the Turing Test.

The Turing Test was invented, not surprisingly, by Alan Turing. It came from a paper entitled Computing Machinery and Intelligence and appeared in Mind in 1950. It was an attempt to determine whether machines could think without defining a “machine” or “think”, since these were potentially ambiguous concepts. He wanted something that could...