HS8.102-Phil.

IHS/Assignment-1/2020101025/CSE
The Turing test was originally designed by Alan Turing in 1950 to test a
computer's ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour which cannot be
distinguished from that of a human. Different people have different
perceptions of what intelligence or being intelligent is. Someone may
consider being intelligent as being able to solve complex calculus
equations while someone else may define being intelligent as having a
good presence of mind and being knowledgeable. The meaning of
intelligence in Turing test's context is being able to behave and respond as
a human being. If a human talks with the computer and cannot
distinguish whether it is a computer or a human, the computer is said to
pass the test and considered as intelligent. This does not require the
computer to give correct answers to questions rather imitate what a
human would have given as an answer. Human behaviour and intelligent
behaviour are not exactly the same thing. For example, there are some
human behaviours which are not intelligent at all like making mistakes
while typing or telling a lie. If the computer cannot replicate these
mistakes, it can fail the test.

In the modified Turing test given in the question, the computer which can
distinguish between a computer and a human by conversation cannot be
considered as intelligent. We are assuming that the human does not trick
the computer into believing that it is a computer and the other computer
also behaves as if it were a normal machine. This test is an incomplete
measure of whether the computer is actually thinking or not. It may
happen that there is no thought process associated with the computer. All
it is doing that it matches the other computer's answers with it's own
generated answers and if they match it says it is talking to a computer and
if they don't then it says it is talking to a human. As we observe, there is no
thinking process involved here and we cant really say that the computer is
intelligent with respect to a human. It is just presenting a very good
simulation of itself as a thinker in which there is no understanding
involved. It just takes input, manipulates them according to a set of rules
and then produces a output. The computer doesn't need to know the
meaning of words which are "spoken" to it. It is just the syntactic
properties of the language that it processes whereas human mind is more
inclined towards the semantic properties of the words and sentences. The
human mind actually understands and makes meaning out of those
sentences and responds suitably. This argument is also enforced by the
Chinese room experiment where the Chinese person outside the room is
deceived into thinking that he is talking to a Chinese person inside the
room whereas in reality, the person is just looking up the manual and
passing the symbols out. Any test of intelligence should test if the
machine is actually involving some thought process and is able to make
out meaning of the words unlike just using a rule book(program in case of
computer) to produce an output.

The test should be designed in such a way that we can draw decisive
conclusion about the mental capacities of the machine. One such possible
test can be analysing the past records of the machine and attributing
intelligence based on it. If the machine has developed languages, written
books, invented new things etc. (all those properties which actually
require thought process and critical thinking) then it can be regarded as
intelligent. We could also test the machine on not only the textual
responses, but also the vocal responses and the tone(emotional, anger,
joy) with which it replies when asked or said something. These activities
require the meaning of the words to be interpreted and then only the
machine can perform these and pass the test. We should not be able to
explain how the machine produced the outputs by appeal to it's
architecture and core functions.

Its a difficult and challenging task to design a machine that can pass these
tests which can be realised from the fact that despite so many advances in
AI, there has been no machine till date that is able to pass the original
Turing test. There have been some promising machines that have
managed to fool some of the interrogators in the Turing test but they
haven't been able to pass it convincingly (say managed to fool around
2/3rds of the judges). It remains to be seen if we can design such machines
that can actually behave and think like humans and be considered
intelligent.