Computing Machinery and Intelligence: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 00:17, 28 January 2024

Revision as of 00:18, 28 January 2024

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In the final section of the paper Turing details his thoughts about the Learning Machine that could play the imitation game successfully.

Here Turing first returns to Lady Lovelace's objection that the machine can only do what we tell it to do and he likens it to a situation where a man "injects" an idea into the machine to which the machine responds and then falls off into quiescence. He extends on this thought by an analogy to an atomic pile of less than critical size, which is to be considered the machine, and an injected idea is to correspond to a [[neutron]] entering the pile from outside the pile; the neutron will cause a certain disturbance which eventually dies away. Turing then builds on that analogy and mentions that, if the [[Critical mass|size]] of the pile were to be sufficiently large, then a neutron entering the pile would cause a disturbance that would continue to increase until the whole pile were destroyed, then the pile would be supercritical. Turing then asks the question as to whether this analogy of a super critical pile could be extended to a human mind and then to a machine. He concludes that such an analogy would indeed be suitable for the human mind with "There does seem to be one for the human mind. The majority of them seem to be "subcritical," i.e., to correspond in this analogy to piles of sub critical size. An idea presented to such a mind will on average give rise to less than one idea in reply. A smallish proportion are supercritical. An idea presented to such a mind that may give rise to a whole "theory" consisting of secondary, tertiary and more remote ideas". He finally asks if a machine could be made to be supercritical.

Turing then mentions that the task of being able to create a machine that could play the imitation game is one of programming and he postulates that by the end of the century it will indeed be technologically possible to program a machine to play the game. He then mentions that in the process of trying to imitate an adult human mind it becomes important to consider the processes that lead to the adult mind being in its present state; which he summarizes as: