The Imitation Game

This issue of the Kybernetes journal is concerned with the philosophical question Can a Machine Think? Famously, in his 1950 paper ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence’ [11], the British mathematician Alan Turing suggested replacing this question which he found “too meaningless to deserve discussion” with a simple [behaviourial] test based on an imagined Victorian-esque pastime he entitled the ‘imitation game’. In this special issue of Kybernetes a selection of authors with a special interest in Turing’s work (including those who participated in the 2008 AISB symposium on the Turing test) have been invited to explore and clarify issues arising from Turing’s 1950 paper on the imitation game; now more widely known as the Turing test. As early as 1941 Turing was thinking about machine intelligence [3] specifically how computing machines could solve problems by searching through the space of possible problem solutions guided by heuristic principles. And in 1947 Turing gave what is perhaps the earliest public lecture on machine intelligence at the Royal Astronomical Society, London. Subsequently, in 1948, following a year’s sabbatical at Cambridge, Turing completed a report for the UK’s National Physical Laboratory on his research into machine intelligence, entitled Intelligent Machinery [10]. Although not published contemporaneously, the report is notable for predicting many core themes which eventually emerged from the yet nascent science of machine intelligence: Expert Systems; Connectionism; Evolutionary Algorithms; but most intriguingly of all in the context of this special issue, the report offers perhaps the earliest version of the imitation game / Turing test. Turing presents this original version as follows: