Speranza
The Turing Test is one of the most disputed topics in Artificial Intelligence, Philosophy of Mind and Cognitive Science.
It has been proposed 50 years ago, as a method to determine whether machines can think or not.
It embodies important philosophical issues, as well as computational ones.
Moreover, because of its characteristics, it requires interdisciplinary attention.
The Turing Test posits that, to be granted intelligence, a computer should imitate human conversational behavior so well that it should be indistinguishable from a real human being.
From this, it follows that conversation is a crucial concept in its study.
Surprisingly, focusing on conversation in relation to the Turing Test has not been a prevailing approach in previous research.
Saygin's thesis provides a thorough and deep review of the 50 years of the Turing Test.
Philosophical arguments, computational concerns, and repercussions in other disciplines are all discussed.
Furthermore, Saygin studies the Turing Test as a special kind of conversation.
In doing so, the relationship between existing theories of conversation and human-computer communication is explored.
In particular, Herbert Paul Grice's cooperative principle and conversational maxims (and the idea of 'implicature' first introduced by Grice in his Oxford seminars on "Logic and Conversation", 1965) are concentrated on.
Viewing the Turing Test as conversation and computers as language users have significant effects on the way we look at Artificial Intelligence, and on communication in general.
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Is Saygin's thesis available online (I googled but did not find)?
ReplyDeleteCan you say more about the relevance of the cooperative principle?
Its a bit bizarre that this so called "Turing test" seemingly another name for Turing's "imitation game" is taken as a test for intelligence. I suppose this is because the word "intelligence" appears in the title of Turing's paper.
ReplyDeleteHowever, the imitation game is offered as an alternative to the question "can a machine think?" and Turing is very explicit that he does not think it does answer that question.
The word "intelligence" appears only once in the paper, and is not used in describing the test or its purpose or background.
(sorry, this is just a rant repeating what I have said before)
I'll try to find more explicit references to Saygin. I agree with your point about the word 'intelligence', too.
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