Courtesy: en.wikipedia.org

Dictionary.com states the Turing Test as:

“A procedure to test whether a computer is capable of humanlike thought.”

            This refers to the fact that this is a procedure to assess how much reasoning can be performed by a computer and how intelligibly can it perform in order to logically evaluate situations and circumstances.

            Alan Turing, the creator of the Turing Test conducted an Imitation Game. According to the game a person sits remotely from a room in which a person and a computer are placed. The remotely located person asks questions from the respondents. If the responses obtained as a result are such that it becomes hard for the interrogator to decide which ones of them are from the customer and which are from the human respondent the computer is said to have passed the test.

The benefits or strengths of Turing Test are that it:

  • “Attempts to give an “objective notion of intelligence”. (Luger, 2009)

This means that it gives an account of the most intelligible answers in response to a set of questions.

  • “Avoids discussion of internal processes and consciousness.” (Luger,2009)
  • Does not result in the emergence of any kind of bias between the instructor and the human being as the questions are generated randomly and the instructor is also not told which answers are from the human being and which are not.

The Weaknesses of Turing Test

  • “Does not incorporate human perceptual skills and manual dexterity. Focuses on symbolic problem solving.” (Luger, 2009)
    • Unnecessarily tries to focus computer intelligence on the pattern of human intelligence.
    • Machine intelligence may be entirely different form human intelligence on the core and relating it to human intelligence may be a grave mistake on its own.

Turing test laid the very basics of computing and was one of the initiators of what evolved into present day information technology boom.