Defining intelligence using Turing Test
The legendary
computer scientist and mathematician, Alan Turing, proposed the
Turing Test to provide a definition of
intelligence. It is a test to see if a computer can learn to mimic human
behavior. He defined intelligent behavior as "the ability to achieve human-level
intelligence during a conversation". This performance should be sufficient to
trick an interrogator into thinking that the answers are coming from a human.
To see if a machine can do this, he
proposed a test setup: he proposed that a human should interrogate the machine through a text
interface. Another constraint is that the human cannot know who's on the other
side of the interrogation, which means it can either be a machine or a human.
To enable this setup, a human will be interacting with two entities through a
text interface. These two entities are called respondents. One of them will be
a human and the other one will be the machine.
The respondent machine passes the test if
the interrogator is unable to tell whether the answers are coming from a machine or a
human. The following diagram shows the setup of a Turing Test:
As you can imagine, this is quite a
difficult task for the respondent machine. There are a lot of things going on
during a conversation. At the very minimum, the machine needs to be well versed
with the following things:
1. Natural Language
Processing:
The machine needs
this to communicate with the interrogator. The machine needs to parse the
sentence, extract the context, and give an appropriate answer.
2. Knowledge
Representation:
The machine needs to store the information provided
before the interrogation. It also needs to keep track of the information being
provided during the conversation so that it can respond appropriately if it comes
up again.
3. Reasoning:
It's important for
the machine to understand how to interpret the information that gets stored.
Humans tend to do this automatically to draw conclusions in real time.
4. Machine Learning:
This is needed so
that the machine can adapt to new conditions in real time. The machine needs to
analyze and detect patterns so that it can draw inferences.
You must be wondering why the human is
communicating with a text interface. According to Turing, physical simulation of a person
is unnecessary for intelligence. That's the reason the Turing Test avoids direct physical
interaction between the human and the machine.
There is another thing called the Total Turing Test that deals with vision and movement. To pass this test, the machine needs to see
objects using computer vision and move around using Robotics.
