Monday, August 23, 2010

Turing Test

One of the interesting questions about consciousness is whether it belongs exclusively to the living. In other words, can people come up with a computer sophisticated enough that it can be considered conscious? Probably the most famous test for this was by the British code breaker in World War II, Alan Turning. The Turing Test would have one person in conversation with another person and a computer. If the computer can answer questions put to it in such a way that people can’t tell it is a computer, it can be considered to be a thinking machine. While it has critics, the Turing test is considered to be a benchmark for artificial intelligence, one that no machine has yet to be able to achieve.

Sort of an interesting analog is the use CAPTCHA, where you are required to input a distorted word or string of letters in order to prevent machines from spamming websites or blogs. Humans are very good at pattern recognition, so these distorted images are typically clear to people. If someone were to develop a pattern recognition software capable of defeating this method of identifying people, it would in a sense be thwarting todays test.

Computers already extend what people can do dramatically; the question is whether people will be able to build essentially minds that are more powerful than their own. The other question this brings up is if they do, will the computers really need people anymore? This has been grist for any number of science fiction plots, the most obvious being HAL in 2001, A Space Odyssey. This brings up some odd moral questions too, would it be ethical to turn off a computer that was ‘aware?’ It also brings up the issue of whether people are simply complex machines, or if there is something more required; either on a quantum level, or if there is some sort of divine spark that makes human’s unique. Just scratching the surface, I lean towards thinking there is something not determined by natural physics laws, but something likely not religious in nature.

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