How can we measure Intelligence?... turns out there's a test for it, called Turing Test. The Test is named after Alan Turing, an English mathematician who pioneered machine learning during the 20th century. He proposed the test in his famous 1950 paper ‘On Computing Machinery and Intelligence'.
Its a test of a machine's ability to exhibit intelligent behavior equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human. - WIKIPEDIA
Since Turing first introduced his test, it has proven to be both highly influential and widely criticized, and it has become an important concept in the philosophy of artificial intelligence.
Turing Test is based on a thought experiment involving a party game, aka 'Imitation Game', in which a man & a woman go into separate rooms and guests try to tell them apart by writing a series of questions and reading the typewritten answers sent back.
What will happen when a machine takes the role of a particpant in this game?
Inspired by this notion, Turing proposed the reformulated version in the context of the following statement:
Imagine a game of 3 players having 2 humans and 1 computer, an interrogator (as human) is isolated from other two players. The interrogator's job is to try and figure out which one is human and which one is computer by asking questions! To make things harder computer is trying to make the interrogator guess wrongly. In other words computer would try to be indistinguishable from human as much as possible.
The 'standard interpretation' of the Turing Test, in which player C, the interrogator, is given the task of trying to determine which player – A or B – is a computer and which is a human. The interrogator is limited to using the responses to written questions to make the determination!
The conversation between interrogator (C) and computer (A) would be like this:
C: Are you a computer? A: No
C: Multiply 45689, 789954. A: (After a long pause, an incorrect answer!)
C: Add 54780, 45645. A: (Pause about 20 second and then give an answer) 100425.
C: Please write me a sonnet on the subject of the Forth Bridge. A: Count me out on this one. I never could write poetry.
C: Do you play chess? A: Yes.
The idea behind the Reverse Turing Test is that instead of thinking about the ways in which machines can be human-like we should also think about the ways in which humans can be machine-like.
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Joseph Weizenbaum's ELIZA1(1966) & Kenneth Colby's PARRY (1972) passed the Turing Test under standard constraints still those achievements has been critisized by various researchers & philosophers alike!
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John Searle proposed the 'Chinese Room' thought experiment and argued that the Turing Test could not be used to determine if a machine can think noting that software (such as ELIZA) could pass the Turing test simply by manipulating symbols of which they had no understanding vis-a-vis lack of consciousness.
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In 2018's Google I/O, Google’s Duplex Artificial Intelligence (AI) demo generated lot of buzz as well as controversy along the lines of Did Google Duplex just pass the Turing Test?
Turing Test has always been controversial since its inception so as to how measuring intelligence can be convoluted with the art of deception. Nonetheless it still remains quite popular among the metrics for measuring artificial intelligence. An annual competition in A.I. based on a standard Turing Test, namely The Loebner Prize awards prizes to the computer programs considered by the judges to be the most human-like!