A computer’s ability to convincingly respond to questions like a person — thereby “passing” what has come to be known as the Turing Test — is widely regarded as a practical measure of artificial intelligence. But Bram van Heuveln, a lecturer in the Department of Cognitive Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, contends that this common interpretation misses the important point that British mathematician Alan Turing was trying to make in his 1950 paper, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence.”
Van Heuveln makes the case for a new understanding of the Turing Test in a chapter of the book Great Philosophical Objections to Artificial Intelligence: The History and Legacy of the AI Wars, published this month by Bloomsbury.