Computing Machinery and Intelligence
In plain wordsAlan Turing's 1950 essay asking whether machines can think. It proposed a conversation test in place of that question, answered objections to thinking machines and suggested that machines might learn like children.
A paper by Alan TuringAlan Turing, prop. n.: A British mathematician who worked out what computers can do in principle, helped break German codes in the Second World War, and proposed the best-known test of machine intelligence. published in the philosophy journal Mind in October 1950 and widely regarded as the founding philosophical text of artificial intelligence. It replaces the question of whether machines can think with the imitation game, later called the Turing testTuring test, n.: Alan Turing's proposed test of machine intelligence: a judge holds typed conversations with a hidden person and a hidden computer, and the computer passes if the judge cannot consistently pick it out.; argues that digital computers are universal machines able to mimic any discrete-state machine; and rebuts nine objections, among them the theological, the mathematical (based on Gödel's incompleteness theorems), the argument from consciousness and Lady Lovelace's claim that machines only do what they are told (see Lovelace objectionLovelace objection, n.: The argument, traced to Ada Lovelace in 1843, that computers cannot be truly creative because they can only do what they have been programmed to do.). Its final section on learning machines proposes building a 'child machine' and educating it with rewards and punishments, anticipating machine learningmachine learning, n.: A way of building software that learns from examples instead of following rules written by a programmer. Shown thousands of labeled photos, for instance, a program can learn to recognize cats. and reinforcement learningreinforcement learning, n.: A way of teaching a computer program by trial and error: it tries actions, earns points for good results and penalties for bad ones, and gradually learns which choices pay off over time.. Turing also forecast that by the end of the twentieth century educated opinion would accept talk of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted.
Most arguments about whether language models understand were already sketched in Computing Machinery and Intelligence.
Origin
Written while Turing was at the University of Manchester, home of the Manchester Mark 1 computer, and published in Mind volume 59, number 236. It developed ideas from his 1948 National Physical Laboratory report 'Intelligent Machinery', which was published only posthumously, in 1968.
Usage note
The paper's opening line, 'I propose to consider the question, Can machines think?', is among the most quoted sentences in the field.
Related
- Turing testTuring test, n.: Alan Turing's proposed test of machine intelligence: a judge holds typed conversations with a hidden person and a hidden computer, and the computer passes if the judge cannot consistently pick it out.
- Alan TuringAlan Turing, prop. n.: A British mathematician who worked out what computers can do in principle, helped break German codes in the Second World War, and proposed the best-known test of machine intelligence.
- Lovelace objectionLovelace objection, n.: The argument, traced to Ada Lovelace in 1843, that computers cannot be truly creative because they can only do what they have been programmed to do.
- Chinese roomChinese room, n.: A thought experiment: a person who knows no Chinese follows a rulebook to answer Chinese messages so well that outsiders think they understand. If the person doesn't understand, does a computer running a program?
- machine learningmachine learning, n.: A way of building software that learns from examples instead of following rules written by a programmer. Shown thousands of labeled photos, for instance, a program can learn to recognize cats.
- artificial intelligenceartificial intelligence, n.: Computer systems that do things we would normally credit to a thinking mind, such as holding a conversation, reading an X-ray or planning a route, and the field of research that builds them.
Sources
- Turing, A. M. (1950). Computing Machinery and Intelligence. Mind 59(236), 433–460.
Mentioned in
Alan TuringAlan Turing, prop. n.: A British mathematician who worked out what computers can do in principle, helped break German codes in the Second World War, and proposed the best-known test of machine intelligence., Turing testTuring test, n.: Alan Turing's proposed test of machine intelligence: a judge holds typed conversations with a hidden person and a hidden computer, and the computer passes if the judge cannot consistently pick it out., Ada LovelaceAda Lovelace, prop. n.: A 19th-century English mathematician who published the first program written for a planned mechanical computer, and who argued that such a machine could only do what it was told., Gödel's incompleteness theoremsGödel's incompleteness theorems, n.: Two famous results from 1931 showing that any consistent set of rules for doing arithmetic leaves some true statements unprovable, and cannot prove that it is itself free of contradictions., machine intelligencemachine intelligence, n.: Intelligence shown by machines; another name for artificial intelligence, preferred by some because it does not suggest that such intelligence is fake., philosophy of artificial intelligencephilosophy of artificial intelligence, n.: The branch of philosophy that asks what AI is and could be: whether machines can think, understand or be conscious, what intelligence is, and what we owe to and should expect from intelligent machines., Turing machineTuring machine, n.: An imaginary, extremely simple computer — a read-write head moving along an endless tape — that Alan Turing used in 1936 to define exactly what can be computed at all., Lovelace objectionLovelace objection, n.: The argument, traced to Ada Lovelace in 1843, that computers cannot be truly creative because they can only do what they have been programmed to do., Lucas–Penrose argumentLucas–Penrose argument, n.: An argument that human minds cannot be computers because, using a famous result in logic, people can see that certain statements are true that no fixed computer program could prove.