I was chair of the Loebner Prize Committee that administered the competition during its second, third, and fourth years, and have written briefly about that fascinating adventure in my book Brainchildren. But ironically, Turing’s conversation-stopper about holding a conversation has had just the opposite effect: it has started, and fueled, a half century and more of meta-conversation: the intermittently insightful, typically heated debate, both learned and ignorant, about the probity of the test – is it too easy or too difficult or too shallow or too deep or too anthropocentric or too technocratic – and anyway, could a machine pass it fair and square, and if so, what, if anything, would this imply? Robert Epstein played a central role in bringing a version – a truncated, dumbed down version – of the Turing Test to life in the annual Loebner Prize competitions, beginning in 1991, so he is ideally positioned to put together this survey anthology. Very sensibly he tried to impose some order on the debate by devising what he thought would be a conversation-stopper: he described a simple operational test that would surely satisfy the skeptics: anything that could pass this test would be a thinker for sure, wouldn’t it? The test was one he may have borrowed from René Descartes, who in the 17th century had declared that the sure way to tell a man from a machine was by seeing if it could hold a sensible conversation “as even the most stupid men can do”. To our children – Vincent, Eli, Bodhi, Julian, Justin, Jordan, and Jenelle – who will grow up in a computational world the likes of which we cannot imagineĪt the very dawn of the computer age, Alan Turing confronted a cacophony of mostly misguided debate about whether computer scientists could ever build a machine that could really think. No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher, with the exception of any material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and executed on a computer system, for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work. Library of Congress Control Number: 2007937657 © 2008 Springer Science + Business Media B.V. Grace Beber Gartner Consulting Stamford, CT USA
Gary Roberts Teradata Corporation San Diego, CA USA Robert Epstein University of California San Diego, CA USA Parsing the Turing Test Philosophical and Methodological Issues in the Quest for the Thinking Computer
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