Lessons from a Restricted Turing Test.

English logician and mathematician Alan Turing, in an attempt to develop a working definition of intelligence free of the difficulties and philosophical pitfalls of defining exactly what constitutes the mental process of intelligent reasoning, devised a test, instead, of intelligent behavior. The idea, codified in his celebrated 1950 paper "Computing Machinery and intelligence," was specified as an "imitation game'' in which a judge attempts to distinguish which of two agents is a human and which a computer imitating human responses by engaging each in a wide ranging conversation of any topic and tenor. Turing's reasoning was, presuming that intelligence only practically determinable behaviorally, that any agent that was indistinguishable in behavior from an intelligent agent was, for all intents and purposes,intelligent. It is presumably uncontroversial that humans are intelligent as evidenced by their conversational behavior. Thus, any agent that can be mistaken by virtue of its conversational behavior with a human must he intelligent.