If you are dealing with artificial intelligence, then you must be heard about the ‘Turing Test.’ In 1950, Alan Turing first proposed this test. The test was about to experiment on whether artificial intelligence can achieve human-level intelligence or not. So, if the AI is able to pass the test, then it has achieved the level of human intelligence. Before going into detail about the Turing test we must know about its inventor Alan Turing.

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About Alan Turing

The life of Turing was interesting and somehow a bit eccentric. He was a British Mathematician who is recognized for his groundbreaking futurist ideas.

In 1935, at the age of 22, he published a theory on probability and won a Fellowship of King’s College, University of Cambridge. He was full of abstract mathematical ideas that served him to push in a completely different direction in a field that was yet to be invented. In 1936, Turing published a paper that is now considered as the foundation of computer science. This is where he invented the concept of a ‘Universal Machine’ that could decode and perform any set of instructions. From 1939 Turing was recruited by the British government as a code-breaker. At the time, Germany was using what is called an ‘enigma machine‘ to encipher all its military and naval signals. Turing rapidly developed a new machine (the ‘Bombe’) which was capable of breaking Enigma messages on an industrial scale. This development has been deemed as instrumental in assisting in pushing back the aggression of Nazi Germany.

In 1946, Turing again started working on his revolutionary idea published in 1936 to develop an electronic computer capable of running various types of computations. He produced a detailed design for what was called the Automatic Computing Engine (ACE.) In 1950, Turing published his seminal work, which raised the question if a “Machine Can Think?“. This paper completely transformed both computer science and AI.

In 1952, Turing was convicted in a police case. Due to this, his security clearance for the government was revoked, and his career was destroyed. In order to punish him, he was chemically castrated. With his life shattered, he committed suicide by poisoning and was later discovered in his home by his cleaner on 8 June 1954. A partly eaten apple lay next to his body. 

Turing died, but his legacy continues to live on.

What is the Turing Test?

As mentioned, in 1950, Turing published a seminal paper named “Computer Machinery and Intelligence.” It was a detailed paper where Turing proposed “ Can machines think?” It proposed an “imitation game” that can define if a machine can think. It was a simple game that could be played by three people – 

• A man (a)
• A woman (b)
• An interrogator (c) 

In this game, the interrogator stays in a room that is separate from both the man (a) and the woman (b). Here the interrogator needs to identify who the man is and who the woman is. In this instance, the goal of the man (a) is to deceive the interrogator. Meanwhile, the woman (b) can attempt to help the interrogator (c). The game should be fair, and no verbal cues can be used. However, typewritten questions and answers are sent back and forth. The question then becomes: How does the interrogator know who to trust?

The interrogator only uses them by the labels X and Y, and at the end of the game, it simply states either ‘X is a and Y is ‘b’ or ‘X is b and Y is a’.

The question then becomes, if we remove the man (a) or the woman (b) and replace that person with an intelligent machine, can the machine use its AI system to trick the interrogator (c) into believing that it’s a man or a woman? This is, in essence, the nature of the Turing Test.

Why does the Turing test matter?

In Alan Turing’s paper, he mentioned the fact that he believed that the Turing Test could eventually be beat. He states: “by the year 2000 I believe that in about fifty years’ time it will be possible to programme computers, with a storage capacity of about 109, to make them play the imitation game so well that an average interrogator will not have more than 70 percent, chance of making the right identification after five minutes of questioning.”

So, if we look at the Turing Test through a modern lens, it seems not impossible that an AI system could trick a human for five minutes. How often do we understand whether the interacting chatbot is a human or bot?

The Turing test has been passed in many incidents. In 2014, a chatbot program Eugene Goostman simulated a 13-year boy at the University of Reading. 33% of judges in Royal society were convinced that it behaved like a human.

In 2018, a Google Duplex reservation system, with the assistance of Google Assistant, made a phone call to a hair salon to schedule an appointment for a haircut. In this case, the AI system did not introduce itself as AI, and during the phone call, pretended to be human while speaking to a salon’s receptionist. After a short exchange, a haircut was successfully scheduled, and both parties hung up.

Furthermore, in the age of Natural language processing (NLP) which is consisted of sub-fields like Natural-language understanding (NLU) and natural-language interpretation (NLI), the pertaining question is, can we say a machine is fully intelligent if it asks and answers questions without fully understanding the context?

Similar to a search engine, keywords and reference points were made. Suppose an AI can achieve this level of comprehension. In that case, we should consider that based on today’s advancing technology, deceiving a human for 5 or 10 minutes is simply not setting the bar high enough.

Conclusion

Ai has evolved a lot since 1950. Not to mention, we should reconsider a new modern definition of the Turing Test. The current test relies a lot on deception and the technology which is in a chatbot. In the era of robotics, for an AI to achieve human-level intelligence truly, the AI will need to interact and “live” in our actual world versus a game environment or a simulated environment with its defined rules.

If, instead of deceiving us, a robot can interact with us like any other human by having conversations, proposing ideas and solutions, maybe only then will the Turing Test be passed. The ultimate version of the Turing Test may be when an AI approaches a human and attempts to convince us that it is self-aware.