Quantum Supremacy: How the Quantum Computer Revolution Will Change Everything

by Michio Kaku

After the war, Turing returned to an age-old problem that had intrigued him as a youth: artificial intelligence. In 1950, he opened his landmark paper on the subject by stating, “I propose to consider the question: Can machines think?” Or to put it another way, is the brain a Turing machine of some sort? He was tired of all the philosophical discussions that stretched back centuries about the meaning of consciousness, the soul, and what makes us human. Ultimately, all this discussion was pointless, he thought, because there was no definitive test or benchmark for consciousness. So Turing came up with the celebrated Turing test. Put a human in a sealed room and a robot in another room. You are allowed to ask each one any written question and read their responses. The challenge is: Can you determine which room held the human? He called this test the imitation game. In his paper, he wrote, “I believe that in about fifty years’ time, it will be possible to programme computers, with a storage capacity of about 109, to make them play the imitation game so well that an average interrogator will not have more than 70 percent chance of making the right identification after five minutes of questioning.” The Turing test replaces endless philosophical debate with a simple reproducible test, to which there is a simple yes-or-no answer. Unlike a philosophical question, for which there is often no answer, this test is decidable. Furthermore, it sidesteps the slippery question of “thinkin...