Welcome to Brainstuff production of I Heart Radio, Hey brain Stuff Lauren Vogelbaum here. The Turning test is legendary in the field of artificial intelligence. First proposed by the visionary British mathematician Alan Turning in a landmark nineteen fifty paper. The test provides a practical and pretty fun way to determine if a computer has achieved human levels of intelligence. Turing called it the imitation game. If a computer, through a text only chat, can convince a human that it's
a real person, then it passes the test. Simple in theory but nearly impossible in practice. Turning came up with the imitation game in response to colleagues and critics in the late nineteen forties who insisted that a machine could never be truly intelligent. But Turning had more faith in these primitive new machines he called digital computers. That's because Turing was the very first to envision something that we take for granted today, a single machine that can be
programmed to do almost anything. Odds are yours sing to this podcast on just such a machine? In brief, Alan Turing was a British mathematician who came up with the idea of modern computing, and whose code breaking played a major role in the Allied victory over the Nazis in World War Two. Also, he was a world class cross country runner who may have qualified for the nineteen forty Olympics if not for an injury. But his life was
also tragic due to prejudices of the time. He was prosecuted in nineteen fifty two for having an affair with another man home sexual acts being illegal in Britain until nineteen sixty seven, and he accepted a form of chemical castration as a condition of probation in order to avoid jail time. His security clearance was revoked, ending his work for the British government. He was found dead of cyanid poisoning in nineteen fifty four, though it's still unclear whether
his death was a suicide or an accident. He was pardoned of his conviction by Queen Elizabeth. The second Turing was writing about computers well before any such thing existed. Back in nineteen thirty six, he introduced the concept of the univer soul computing machine and a dense mathematical paper called on Computable Numbers with an application to the chitons problem. This was a decade before the first electronic computer would
be built. Turning wrote, according to my definition, a number is computable if its decimal can be written down by a machine. It is possible to invent a single machine which can be used to compute any computable sequence. Turing's definition of computability of something that a computer can do is what's known today as an algorithm. Turning was the first to lay out the design framework of a machine that could be programmed to run a series of discrete
algorithms in order to achieve a desired task. Other mathematicians and engineers had toyed with calculating machines, most famously Charles Babbage's nineteenth century analytical engine, but Turing envisioned a device that wasn't limited to solving one kind of problem. We spoke with Andrew Hodges, a mathematics professor at Oxford University an author of Alan Turing The Enigma, the inspiration for
the Oscar winning film The Imitation Game. Hodges explained, anything you can describe as an algorithm can be done by one machine. The universal machine is essentially what we mean by a computer, now, something on which you can store the instructions and it carries them out, and no one else had formalized that idea. From the start, Turns universal machine was conceived as a very simplified form of artificial intelligence, even though that term wouldn't be coined until ninety six.
Hodges says that the design of the universal machine was meant to imitate the inner workings of the human mind, a subject that fascinated Turing almost as much as mathematics. In fact, when describing how his universal machine would work, Turn used the term state of mind to label the different read and write functions of the machine. In Turn's conceptual machine, a length of tape is run through a read write scanner. The tape is inscribed with bits of
information represented by symbols. The scanner head can either read the symbols or write new ones according to its state of mind. Turning wrote in his nineteen thirty six paper, the operation actually performed is determined by the state of mind of the computer and the observed symbols. In particular, they determine the state of mind of the computer after the operation is carried out. A decade later, when Turing was leading the stalled British effort to build one of
the first electronic computers in nineteen forty six. He also studied neurology and human physiology on the side. The result was an internal paper published for the National Physical Laboratory that modeled how a computer could be programmed to learn on its own. Hod Just sees it as one of the earliest proposals of what are now called neural networks, a type of deep machine learning that's at the bleeding edge of artificial intelligence. Turing wasn't the only person intrigued
by the similarities between human and machine intelligence. A surge of new technologies developed during World War Two, including early computers, space satellites, and nuclear power, had captured the intellectual and public imagination. Hodges said, as soon as computer as are mentioned at all, people are talking about electronic brains and
the possibility of the computer rivaling the brain. The nineteen forty eight books Cybernetics by Norbert Wiener coined the prefix cyber and wondered whether it would be possible to quote construct a chess playing machine and whether this sort of ability represents an essential difference between the potentialities of the machine and the mind. Wiener concluded that such a machine might very well be as good a player as the
vast majority of the human race. It was during this era of excitement and nervous speculation about superintelligent machines the Turning wrote Computing, Machinery and Intelligence, what Hodges calls one of the most cited papers in philosophical literature. Turning begins, I propose to consider the question can machines think? Then, since the definitions of machine and think are ambiguous, Turning
narrows the scope of the question for his purposes. The machine must be a digital computer, and the test of whether or not it can think would be answered by the imitation game. The game game, now known as the Turning Test, is only mentioned briefly in the paper, and Hodges says that Turing didn't take the details of the test too seriously, publishing different versions in other papers. But Turning did like the playful simplicity of it. Hodges said, in a way he was making a drama out of it.
It presented this idea of the possibility of advanced artificial intelligence in a way that engages people, and that ordinary people would make the decision like a jury in a trial. When the Turing Test was first published in nineteen fifty Turning himself was confident that intelligent machinery, as he called it, would be able to win the Invitation Game within fifty to a hundred years. So will his predictions come true? We already have super intelligent computers capable of outwitting the
smartest players in other types of games. IBM's Deep Blue defeated the reigning chess champion Gary Kasparov, and Watson beat the record breaking Jeopardy champion Ken Jennings in two thousand eleven. But the Imitation Game raises the bar high on artificial intelligence, and no computer has come close to convincing an ordinary human that is one of us, at least not yet.
An annual contest called the Loebner Prize conducts its own turing tests on the top chat bots to see if the latest AI software could convince a panel of judges that it's just as human as its human creators. None
of the chat bots have succeeded. The best performer, a conversational chatbot called Mistaku, has only achieved a rating of thirty three human, but when our writer Dave went online to chat with her, he was impressed by her natural language responses and deep knowledge, albeit probably too deep for a typical dope human, he said. And when he asked her if a chat bot will ever pass the Turing test, she had the perfect answer, you be the judge of that.
Today's episode written by Dave Ruse and produced by Tyler Clang. Brain Stuff is a production of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. For more in this and lots of other intelligent topics, visit our home planet, how stuff Works dot com. And for more podcasts for My heart Radio, including one from Ken Jennings called Omnibus, visit that I Heart Radio app, app podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H