If not Turing ’ s test , then what ? Paul

If it is true that good problems produce good science, then it will be worthwhile to identify good problems, and even more worthwhile to discover the attributes that make them good problems. This discovery process is necessarily empirical, so we examine several challenge problems, beginning with Turing’s famous test, and more than a dozen attributes that challenge problems might have. We are led to a contrast between research strategies — the successful “divide and conquer” strategy and the promising but largely untested “developmental” strategy — and we conclude that good challenge problems encourage the latter strategy. 1 Turing’s test: Our first challenge More than fifty years ago, Alan Turing proposed a clever test of the proposition that machines can think [7]. He wanted the proposition to be an empirical one and he particularly wanted to avoid haggling over what it means for anything to think. Turing first introduced a game in which a man and a woman engage a third person, called the interrogator, in conversation, and the interrogator tries to guess which of the two is the man and which is the woman. Then he suggests substituting a computer for one of the two: We now ask the question, “What will happen when a machine takes the part of [the man] in this game?” Will the interrogator decide wrongly as often when the game is played like this as he does when the game is played between a man and a woman? These questions replace our original, “Can machines think?” More recently, the test has taken slightly different forms. Most contemporary versions ask simply whether the interrogator can be fooled into identifying the machine as human, not necessarily a man or a woman. There are many published arguments about Turing’s paper and I want to look at three kinds of argument. One kind says, Turing’s test is irrelevant; another concerns the philosophy of machines that think; the third is methodological. 1.1 Ignore it, and maybe it will go away... Blay Whitby [8] offers this humorous history of the Turing Test: 1950 1966: A source of inspiration to all concerned with AI. 1966 1973: A distraction from some more promising avenues of AI research. 1973 1990: By now a source of distraction mainly to philosophers, rather than AI workers. 1990: Consigned to history.