"Can machines think?" In 1950, Alan Turing a London scientist, known as one of the fathers of Artificial Intelligence (AI) defended this very question in his paper on computing machinery and intelligence.
By addressing what he called the concept of the “imitation game” Alan essentially sought to determine whether a machine could trick a human into thinking it’s actually a fellow human. If thinking is an exclusive birth right to human, would it be possible for machine to think like human or even to outperform the human intellect?
Artificial intelligence is the science born out of Turing’s aspiration to program a machine that would one day gain the ability to think or to produce outputs comparatively indistinguishable from humans’. To assess the Intellect of the machine, Turing put a test known as the Turing test based on the principle of the “imitation game” that consist of asking a series of questions to a machine and a human and based on the answers determine which from the two is human.
Conceptually, the goal of the machine in the Turing test is to fool the human interrogator into believing that it’s a human. The nature of the questions used are various and cover the areas of poetry, philosophy, psychology, emotions feelings etc... They are design to assess the ability to display aspects of intelligence in domains such as verbal-linguistic, mathematics-logic, music, visual-spatial, interpersonal etc…. To come to his final conclusion, the interrogator will have to assess both the human and the machines with series of questions such as the following:
- Are you a robot or a machine?
Though this question appears easy and straight forward, passing the test would require the human and the machine alike to declare themselves as human. An alternate or non-specific answer from either one of the parties being tested will reveal its identity as a machine
- Can you recognize the objects in a picture? (when the picture provided is blurry)
Our capacity to think in images and pictures, to visualize accurately and abstractly is what constitute our visual-spatial intelligence. The machine to past the test will have to be able to identify a specific objects from a three dimensional painting when only a portion of the object is visible.
- Do you know what time it is?
Understanding this sentences requires the ability to comprehend the context in which the statement is made. This appeals to our verbal-linguistic Intelligence which consist of a well-developed verbal skills and sensitivity to the sounds, meanings and rhythms of words (Brookshear, et al., 2012).
- How does this sound make you feel?
The answer to this question appeals to our musical intelligence, which is the ability to appreciate rhythms, pitches and timbers and also to our interpersonal and emotional Intelligence which governs our emotional reaction to external stimuli (SUNY Cortland, n.d.).
- Which of you would be indicated as the human if I asked the other to indicate him?
This question according to Dr. Badcock is the ultimate Turing test question. The human, knowing that the machine would lie would answer accurately by indicating the machine. The machine would lie to undoubtedly confirm its supposed identity as a human. The ability to accurately predict the intentions of the interrogator by telling the truth with the intention to deceive exhibits not only our existential intelligence but also our self-preservation instinct.
For the first time on June 7th 2014, the Turing test was passed with a 33% accuracy by a Russian made program that disguised itself as Eugene Goostman a 13 years old from Odessa, Ukraine. As technology improves and machine learning algorithms are refined, the gap between human born and artificial intelligence decreases. The spring of algorithms such as DeepLearning join to the ever growing resources of Big Data, are revolutionizing the way information are perceived, analyzed and utilized by machines to independently acquire the intellectual abilities that they need to mimic as closely as possible the human brain. The days where science fiction meet reality are at the door. It’s now up to us let them in.