The Controversy Surrounding Turing's Imitation Game

Abstract

In Chapter 2 we saw that Turing described a number of scenarios featuring a machine being interrogated by a human. In that pre-Internet era Turing's foresaw a way his game could be played across two rooms with the participants, human interrogator and machine, hidden from each other and communicating by typing. Turing's imitation game is less concerned with actually deceiving a naive human interrogator and more about a machine's ability to provide satisfactory answers to any questions a human might put to it (see Chapter 2), and that the machine's satisfactory answers must be sustained. In order that the machine is not judged on its beauty or its tone of voice it must be out of sight and hearing of the interrogator who is tasked with focussing on the answers to any questions they might want to ask – we contend five minutes is adequate for a first impression. Why should the machines be able to do this? More and more robots are being developed to interact with humans, such as Hector , a care robot built to look after the elderly isolated in their own home. Future machines should be able talk to us just as we talk with others. Since publication of Computing machinery and intelligence (CMI) (Turing, 1950) and his proposed imitation game for investigating machine thinking through two different tests, both pivoting on linguistic inputs and outputs as criteria for intelligence (Schweizer, 2010), a whole industry has grown. According to Loebner (2010) the correct design for a Turing test involves three participants in which an interrogator questions a machine and human in parallel, an interpretation which Loebner claims he realised after implementing thirteen one-to-one tests in his annual Loebner Prize, “the oldest Turing test contest”.2 Loebner's interpretation overlooks Turing's own description for his imitation game and the two methods for realising it: (i) a simultaneous comparison of a machine against a human, both questioned by a human interrogator (Turing, 1950); and (ii) the direct machine examination by a human interrogator in a viva voce type scenario (Turing, 1950; Braithwaite et al., 1952). Turing's biographer Andrew Hodges tells us Turing was working at Manchester University at the time of CMI's publication in 1950.