The Turing Test: A New Appraisal

This paper appraises some of the prevailing ideas surrounding one of Turing's brilliant ideas, his imitation game experiment, and considers judge performance in assessing machine thinking in the light of practical Turing tests. The emphasis is not on philosophical aspects as to whether machines can think or not but rather on the nature of the discourses performed in the game. Here the authors are more concerned with the nature of human communication and attempts by machines to behave in the same way. In particular the authors look at some of the strategies that Turing suggested would not be good and he has been proved correct. Also authors look at the side track argument, that some have misguidedly introduced, regarding identifying the difference between females and males through such discourse.