Thread: Why is the Turing Test considered a good test of AI?

Recently a British AI program won an award for being close to passing the Turing Test. The Turing Test is an idea that a computer can be said to be intelligent if, during a five minute conversation, it can fool you into believing you are talking to a human and not a computer.

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My problem with this form of test is that why should a "conversation with a human" be confused with "intelligence". I am not being facetious as I'm sure the concept of intelligence that Turing was talking about is present in almost every human. The problem is that a computer's "social life" could be far more limited than a human's. If a computer was asked "What did you have for breakfast?" wouldn't it be a far more intelligent response to say "I didn't have anything, I'm a computer" rather lie or give an evasive response.

It would mean the computer would fail the Turing test, but it doesn't seem to me to be proof of lack of intelligence.

Originally Posted by angrysoba

Recently a British AI program won an award for being close to passing the Turing Test. The Turing Test is an idea that a computer can be said to be intelligent if, during a five minute conversation, it can fool you into believing you are talking to a human and not a computer.

You can speak to the 'bots at this address:

http://www.jabberwacky.com/

My problem with this form of test is that why should a "conversation with a human" be confused with "intelligence". I am not being facetious as I'm sure the concept of intelligence that Turing was talking about is present in almost every human. The problem is that a computer's "social life" could be far more limited than a human's. If a computer was asked "What did you have for breakfast?" wouldn't it be a far more intelligent response to say "I didn't have anything, I'm a computer" rather lie or give an evasive response.

It would mean the computer would fail the Turing test, but it doesn't seem to me to be proof of lack of intelligence.

Problem is people misinterpret him. I have always believed that what Alan actually meant was a scenario where the computer was discussing the content of a book, say Jayne Eyre. If of course the computer could lie, convincingly and create a breakfast that would be yet a higher level.
You are right though, any subjective converstaion with a computer would need it to lie to answer. Computers are objective and governed by very strict programs written with only 5 basic logical operations, 'MOVE ADD MASK COMPARE ROTATE' with many subsets.