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Some Implications of a Sample of Practical Turing Tests

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Abstract

A series of imitation games involving 3-participant (simultaneous comparison of two hidden entities) and 2-participant (direct interrogation of a hidden entity) were conducted at Bletchley Park on the 100th anniversary of Alan Turing’s birth: 23 June 2012. From the ongoing analysis of over 150 games involving (expert and non-expert, males and females, adults and child) judges, machines and hidden humans (foils for the machines), we present six particular conversations that took place between human judges and a hidden entity that produced unexpected results. From this sample we focus on features of Turing’s machine intelligence test that the mathematician/code breaker did not consider in his examination for machine thinking: the subjective nature of attributing intelligence to another mind.

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Acknowledgments

The authors wish to express their gratitude to Bletchley Park Trust for allowing the tests to go ahead at their venue. They also wish to thank the humans who acted as judges and those who acted as hidden humans for their time input. They also wish to thank the machine designers and the machines themselves. Most of all though, our gratitude goes to the team that made the event happen technically, namely Marc Allen, Ian Bland and Chris Chapman.

Developers

Such tests would not be possible without the developers involved and their machines. Our thanks go, in no particular order, to Rollo Carpenter and Cleverbot, Fred Roberts and Elbot, Robert Medeksza and Ultra Hal, Robby Garner and JFred and finally Vladimir Veselov and Eugene.

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Correspondence to Kevin Warwick.

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Warwick, K., Shah, H. & Moor, J. Some Implications of a Sample of Practical Turing Tests. Minds & Machines 23, 163–177 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11023-013-9301-y

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