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Dozens of movies and television shows depict computers and robots taking over the world, and attempting to destroy humanity. Could that ever really happen? The debate rages on and probably will for a long time to come.
After all, a computer is merely the sum of information fed to it by a human, right. When something goes wrong with a computer, we blame the program created by a human. Some will argue that a super fast computer can calculate mathematical operations, or play chess, against a human and win. Others will answer that the person who programmed the game and the math program is the one who is super smart and super fast.
Unfortunately, one man who thrived to answer that question, died over 50 years ago. His name was Alan Turing, a mathematician, logician, and a computer scientist, born on June 23, 1912, in London, England.
Alan Turing developed a test, called The Turing Test, which tested a machine’s ability to display intelligence. A text-only test between a human and a computer engaging in a conversation, another human had to guess which one is the human, and which one is the computer.
Turing first mentioned this test in a paper he wrote in 1950 titled, Computing Machinery and Intelligence. The first line of the writing was “I propose to consider the question, Can machines think? Turing goes on to explain that the term, thinking, is hard to define, and therefore he rewords the original question, asking if a computer is able to fare better in the Turing test than a human.
Although highly criticized since its introduction, philosophers use The Turing Test to argue on the side of the possibility of artificial intelligence.
