The Turing test II - Turning points in the history of the Turing Tests.

Blay Whitby lists four major turning points in the history of the Turing Test — the publication of "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" in 1950, the announcement of Joseph Weizenbaum's ELIZA in 1966, Kenneth Colby's creation of PARRY, which was first described in 1972, and the Turing Colloquium in 1990. Sixty years following its introduction, and continued argument over Turing's 'can machines think?' experiment, led to its reconsideration for the 21st century through the AISB's 'Towards a comprehensive intelligence test' symposium, 29 March - 1 April 2010, at De Montford University, UK.

ELIZA works by examining a user's typed comments for keywords. If a keyword is found, a rule that transforms the user's comments is applied, and the resulting sentence is returned. If a keyword is not found, ELIZA responds either with a generic riposte or by repeating one of the earlier comments. In addition, Weizenbaum developed ELIZA to replicate the behaviour of a Rogerian psychotherapist, allowing ELIZA to be "free to assume the pose of knowing almost nothing of the real world." With these techniques, Weizenbaum's program was able to fool some people into believing that they were talking to a real person, with some subjects being "very hard to convince that ELIZA [...] is not human." Thus, ELIZA is claimed by some to be one of the programs (perhaps the first) able to pass the Turing Test, although this view is highly contentious.

Colby's PARRY has been described as "ELIZA with attitude": it attempts to model the behaviour of a paranoid schizophrenic, using a similar (if more advanced) approach to that employed by Weizenbaum. In order to validate the work, PARRY was tested in the early 1970s using a variation of the Turing Test. A group of experienced psychiatrists analysed a combination of real patients and computers running PARRY through teletype machines. Another group of 33 psychiatrists were shown transcripts of the conversations. The two groups were then asked to identify which of the "patients" were human and which were computer programs. The psychiatrists were able to make the correct identification only 48 per cent of the time — a figure consistent with random guessing.

In the 21st century, ELIZA and PARRY have been developed into malware systems, such as CyberLover, which preys on Internet users convincing them to "reveal information about their identities or to lead them to visit a web site that will deliver malicious content to their computers" ((iTWire, 2007). A one-trick pony, CyberLover, a software program developed in Russia, has emerged as a "Valentine-risk" flirting with people "seeking relationships online in order to collect their personal data" (V3, 2010).

John Searle's 1980 paper Minds, Brains, and Programs proposed an argument against the Turing Test known as the "Chinese room" thought experiment. Searle argued that software (such as ELIZA) could pass the Turing Test simply by manipulating symbols of which they had no understanding. Without understanding, they could not be described as "thinking" in the same sense people do. Therefore—Searle concludes—the Turing Test cannot prove that a machine can think.

Arguments such as that proposed by Searle and others working on the philosophy of mind sparked off a more intense debate about the nature of intelligence, the possibility of intelligent machines and the value of the Turing test that continued through the 1980s and 1990s.

Based on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0