The post doesn't do justice to the subtlety of Turing's insight. The Turing test is two-faced in that the interrogator is addressing two contestants, the computer and the human. He doesn't know which is which, but he hopes that comparing their answers will reveal their identities. But the Turing test is two-faced in a second way.

Turing hopes that the test will satisfy its audience, but that audience contains two groups. There is a pro-AI group. Some of them will have been involved in writing the initial source code of the AI that is taking the test. They are cheering on the AI. Then there is the anti-AI group, staunchly maintaining that computers cannot think. They admire the trickery of the programmers, but refuse to credit the creation with the thoughts of its creators.

Consider a conventional test that resembles a university examination. Perhaps the computer scores high marks. The anti-AI refuses to budge. The coders have merely hired experts in the subject being examined and laboured hard to construct a brittle facade of apparent knowledge. Let us change the curriculum,...

But a conventional test has both failure modes. If the computer scores low marks the pro-AI crowd will refus... (read more)

The best way to avoid this is to create more varied analogues of the Turing test - and to keep them secret. Just as you keep the training set and the test set distinct in machine learning, you want to confront the putative AIs with quasi-Turing tests that their designers will not have encountered or planed for.

But aren't these just instances of the Turing test? As the judge, you're allowed to ask any questions you like to try and distinguish the AI program from the human contestant, including novel and unexpected questions that the entrants have not had any chance to prepare for. At some point you will completely flummox the AI, but you will also flummox the human too. The interesting question then is whether you can tell the difference I.e. will the AI behave in a near-human way when trying to cope with a baffling and completely unexpected problem? If it does, that is a real sign if intelligence, is it not?

My own practical version of the Turing test is "can we be friends?" (It used to be "can we fall in love?") Once an AI passes a test like that I think the question of whether it's "genuinely" conscious should be dissolved.

Actually, scratch that: either way, I think the question of whether something is "genuinely" conscious should be dissolved.

... I would be willing to bet that the first entity to pass the test will not be conscious, or intelligent, or have whatever spark or quality the test is supposed to measure.

I think the OP, and many commenters here, might be missing the point of the Turing test (and I can't help but suspect that the cause is not having read Turing's original article describing the idea; if so, I highly recommend remedying that situation).

Turing was not trying to answer the question "is the computer conscious", nor (the way he put it) "can machines think". His goal was to replace that question.

Some representative quotes (from Turing's "Computing Machinery and Intelligence"; note that "the imitation game" was Turing's own term for what came to be called the "Turing test"):

May not machines carry out something which ought to be described as thinking but which is very different from what a man does? This objection [to the critique that failure of the test may prove nothing] is a very strong one, but at least we can say that if, nevertheless, a machine can be constructed to play the imitation game satisfactorily, we need not be troubled by this obje

Humans seem to have something similar, e.g. humans who are unable to form mental imagery can talk normally but perform badly on any task which is difficult to do without mental imagery. And in programming there are people who seem intelligent on basis of how they talk about programming but are surprisingly bad at constructing anything that works for a given, fixed task.

I don't think the "over-fitting" problem applies to the Turing Test: you can ask the candidate about anything, and adapt your later questions accordingly. There are proofs in computational complexity (that I'm too lazy to look up right now) that show that you can't pass this kind of test (except with exponentially small probability) but by containing a polynomial-time algorithm for the entire problem space. (It's related to the question of what problems are IP-complete -- i.e. the hardest among those problems that can be quickly solved via inte... (read more)

Incidentally, humans have been known to fail Turing tests once in a while, being mistaken for computers instead.

Also, there has been one ELIZA variation that's managed to successfully come across as human to people who were aware that they might fool people: it imitates a paranoid schizophrenic who believes the Mafia is out to get him, and if asked about something else, it insists on talking about the Mafia instead. Apparently, psychiatrists couldn't tell it wasn't a real patient... which probably says more about people with severe mental illness than it does about artificial intelligence.

if you ask them to do any planning, for instance, they'll come up with designs that sound good but fail: they parrot back other people's plans with minimal modifications

Guessing the teacher's password describes a common human behavior. An AI that behaves the same way not just passes the Turing test, it might really be said to be as intelligent as a relatively stupid human.

Also, there's a huge quantitative difference between a student repeating what the teacher said, and an AI repeating at will everything written in all digitized books and Internet sites... (read more)

The concept of the Turing test fails to impress me in both directions (I'd guess an abundance of both false positives and false negatives)

If penguins had to determine whether humans have reached penguin-level intelligence, being able to mimick a penguin's mating-call would be just the sort of test that penguins would devise. But it's not a proper test of intelligence, it's a test of penguin-mimickry by creatures so simplistic (or simplex in the terminology of Samuel R. Delany) as to think that "Intelligence" means "Acting Much Like A Penguin Would".

Hmm, after reading the post again I have downvoted it as too weak for Main. No new concepts, no interesting questions, just some musings. Not even a clear definition of what "conscious" means. The idea that "a secret Turing test is better than an overt one" is fine for Discussion, maybe, or for an open thread.

I am compelled to link to this amusing short science fiction story.

The classical problem is that the Turing Test is behavioristic and only provides a sufficient criterion (rather than replacing talk about 'intelligence' as Turing suggests). And it doesn't provide a proper criterion in that it relies on human judges - who tend to take humans for computers, in practice. - Of course it is meant to be open-ended in that "anything one can talk about" is permitted, including stuff that's not on the web. That is a large set of intelligent behavior, but a limited set - so the "design to the test" you are poin... (read more)

I'm not entirely sure what you mean by "Turing Test". As far as I understand, the test is not multiple choice; instead, you just converse with the test subject as best you can, then make your judgement. And, since the only judgements you can make are "human" and "non-human", the test doesn't tell you how well the test subject can solve urban navigation problems or whatever; all it tells you is how good the subject is at being human.

The trick, though, is that in order to converse on a human level, the test subject would have to... (read more)

Did you know that we already have instances of things that pass the Turing test?

And more surprisingly, that we don't generally consider them conscious?

And the most amazing of all: That they have existed for probably at the very least a hundred thousand years (but possibly much more)?

I am talking about the characters in our dreams

They fool us into thinking that they are conscious! That they are the subjects of their own worlds just as people presumably are when awake.

You can have a very eloquent conversation with a dream character without ever noticing ther... (read more)

Here is a simple algorithm that passes Turing test:

Using [EDIT: random] quantum events, generate random bits and send them to output.

In some Everett branches this algorithm passes the test.

(Somewhat related: If Mr. Searle shows me a "giant lookup table" which passes the Turing test and asks me whether it is intelligent, my response will be: "Stop playing silly games and show me the algorithm that created the lookup table.")

I would certainly rate it as plausible that we could create beings that are nearly perfectly conscious from a linguistic perspective.

I'm not really sure what you mean by "conscious from a linguistic perspective," and judging from your responses to other comments I infer that neither are you.

So let me try some simpler questions: is Watson conscious from a Jeapordy-game-playing perspective? Is a system that can perfectly navigate a maze conscious from a maze-navigation perspective? Is an adding machine conscious from an adding-numbers-together... (read more)

Only peripherally related: I remember reading an essay ages ago about someone, probably Hofstadter, being called in by a bunch of college students to administer a semi-Turing test (that is, talk to one system and decide whether it's intelligent) to a particularly impressive system they'd encountered while hacking into computer networks, but I can't find it now. Does anyone else share this recollection in a more useful form?

There is a problem with the Turing test, practically and philosophically, and I would be willing to bet that the first entity to past the test will not be conscious,

First, you mean "pass", not "past", I assume. Second, what definition of "conscious" are you using here? If you reject p-zombies, then it has to be behavioral. From this post it seems like this behavior is "able to pass a secret Turing test most actual humans can pass". which is not a great definition, given how many actual humans fail the existing Turing test miserably.

I don't know how useful the Turing Test is. It is (as I understand it) supposed to tell when a computer has become conscious, by comparing its responses to human responses. Yet, only in the case of an Uploaded Mind would we expect the computer to be like a human. In practically every other situation we would've given the computer a varietal of different properties. The possible mind space of conscious beings is vastly larger than the mind space of conscious humans.

I've always assumed I would ask the testee to solve a few toy problems expressed in natural language, to see if they can think about things other than conversation itself. After all, in real life I ask people things. Is this considered cheating?

nearly everyone's heard of the Turing test. So the first machines to pass the test will be dedicated systems, specifically designed to get through the test.

The problem with this line of reasoning is that the Turing test is very open-ended. You have no idea what a bunch of humans will want to talk to your machine about. Maybe about God, maybe about love, maybe about remembering your first big bloody scrape as a kid... Maybe your machine will get some moral puzzles, maybe logical paradoxes, maybe some nonsense.

And once a machine is truly able to sustain a long conversation on any topic, well, at this point we get back to the interesting question of what does "intelligent" mean.