From newshub.ccs.yorku.ca!torn!cs.utexas.edu!sun-barr!olivea!uunet!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!news.media.mit.edu!minsky Mon Aug 24 15:40:41 EDT 1992
Article 6606 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: minsky@media.mit.edu (Marvin Minsky)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Turing Test Myths
Message-ID: <1992Aug13.024527.2079@news.media.mit.edu>
Date: 13 Aug 92 02:45:27 GMT
References: <BILL.92Aug11105853@ca3.nsma.arizona.edu> <1992Aug12.063425.13479@zip.eecs.umich.edu> <BILL.92Aug12122254@ca3.nsma.arizona.edu>
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Organization: MIT AI Laboratory
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Cc: minsky

In article <BILL.92Aug12122254@ca3.nsma.arizona.edu> bill@nsma.arizona.edu (Bill Skaggs) writes:
>marky@dip.eecs.umich.edu (Mark Anthony Young) writes:
>>We now ask the question, "What will happen when a machine takes
>> the part of A in this game?"  Will the interrogator decide wrongly
>> as often when the game is played like this as he does when the
>> game is played between a man and a woman?  These questions
> >replace  our original, "Can machines think?"
>
>Okay, I was wrong.  It was me who was confused.  But it's hard for me
>to believe that Turing actually realized what he was saying when he
>wrote this.  Suppose it turned out that interrogators could
>distinguish between men and women 100% of the time, and they could
>also distinguish between men and computers 100% of the time.  Would
>this imply that computers think as much like men as women do?
>Obviously not.
>
>... I might be right, or I might be wrong, but it doesn't seem
reasonable
>that the question whether I'm right or wrong has anything to do with
>the question whether machines can think.
 
Turing DID realize what he was saying, but most people seemed to have
missed his point.
 
Yes, the question has very little to do with "whether machines can
think".  That's because Turing considered that sinmply to be too
ill-defined a question to be worthy of attention.  And that's
precisely why he proposed to *replace* -- rather than answer the
question "Can machines think?"  So, the Turing Test is *not* to
determine whether machines can think, but simply to see just what it
might take in order to get people to believe that a machine can think.
And he proposes only a sufficient condition for this, not a necessary
condition.
 
By the way, this group was productive until it caught this disease of
trying to define intelligence.  Turing wrote his paper precisely
because he considered this an unproductive activity.


