![]() The question Turing asked was 'can machines think?' It's interesting that the criteria used is the ability to communicate, which means, to pass the Turing test, a machine needs to be able to process and *understand* language well enough to fool a human. No, that is a step and a question much further down the road. It is by no means a test for human-like intelligence in machines. The endeavour to create 'artificial’ intelligence that can grow, learn, and adapt on its own, that can fool humans, does beg the question 'at what point does sentience emerge?’ Turing's Imitation Game is one step in the process, and so it fascinates me. I'm a philosopher interested in questions of sentience. I'm not necessarily interested in robotics or cybernetics. Part Two focuses on recent practical tests, from 2008-2014, with interviews with machine developers, and a section on what the future may hold for AI. Beyond that, Part One is mostly an overview of history, with sections on Turing's ideas in regards to thinking machines, a brief history of AI, controversy over the Imitation Game, a history of 'conversation systems’, and questions raised by early Turing tests. The first looks at Turing the man, but it is a brief overview only interested in the parts of his life relevant to the invention of the Game. Turing’s Imitation Game is divided into several sections. Rather than being a book about Turing the man, Warwick and Shah focus specifically on Turing's famous Imitation Game, a tool for judging artificial intelligence, or rather, can a given machine 'think’? This game asks the question 'can a hidden machine fool a human into thinking they were having a conversation with another human?’ **This book was reviewed for the San Francisco and Seattle Book Reviews** I did learn quite a few things no matter what. or am I aiming too high?), and it’s too early anyway for the current AIs to have been developed far enough (as fascinating as some of their conversations were, they still looked much more like complex chatbots than anything else-at least, to me).Ĭonclusion: 3.5 stars. Another one is whether the test as it exists can really be used as a marker: aren’t the various chatbots/AIs out there simply well-programmed, but in no way indicative of whether they’ll be able to go further than that?Īlso, I’m not sure I can agree with the 2014 ‘the Turing test has been passed’ result, as it seems to me the percentage is too low to warrant such a qualifier (if 90% of judges were fooled in believing they were conversing with a human, now that’d be something else. Namely, the fact that it’s based on language, and that one may wonder whether being able to converse means one is gifted with ‘thought’. The test as a whole posits several interesting questions and conundrums. Eugene Goostman, especially, with its persona of a 13-year old Ukrainian boy whose English is only second language, has good potential (in that you can tell some of its/his answers are stilted, but not more than if it/he was an actual learner of ESOL). At other times, I was surprised at the outcome, for instance quite a few human participants made ‘boring’ answers to conversations, which in turn prompted judges to believe they were talking to a machine-and conversely, some AIs were clearly programmed with a variety of lively potential responses. I was accurate in my guesses except but once, I think, however I can see where judges were ‘fooled’, and why. ![]() Actual, textual examples allow the reader to try and make their own judgment-and determining where the machines are is not so easy as it seems. Several sections in the book are devoted to examples of studies and events during which the test took place, pitching human judges against both machines and other human beings, without the former knowing what or who the latter was. It sheds light on Turing’s aim when devising the test, as well as on what he predicted, and that may or may not happen sooner than expected. That was an informative, albeit also controversial, read about Turing’s ‘Imitation Game’, focused on the game itself rather than on the man (who I like reading about in general, but here I was definitely more interested in his famous ‘test’, since I keep hearing about it, but never in much detail).
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