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Book Details

The Turing Test is part of the vocabulary of popular culture - it has appeared in works ranging from the Broadway play Breaking the Code to the comic strip "Robotman." The writings collected for this book examine the profound philosophical issues surrounding the Turing Test as a criterion for intelligence. Alan Turing's idea, originally expressed in a 1950 paper titled "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" and published in the journal Mind, proposed an "indistinguishability test" that compared artifact and person. Following Descartes' dictum that it is the ability to speak that distinguishes human from beast, Turing suggested testing whether machine and person were indistinguishable in regard to verbal ability. He was not, as is often assumed, answering the question "Can machines think?" but offering a more concrete way to ask it. Turing's thought experiment encapsulates the issues that the writings in The Turing Test define and discuss.