The Thought Experiment in the Foundations of Artificial Intelligence Research Paper

The Thought Experiment in the Foundations of Artificial Intelligence - Research Paper Example However, this is limited to a text only channel such as a keyboard and display screen to display the results. The test involves an interrogator, a machine and a person. The interrogator should be in a room separated from both the machine and the other person. All participants are in fact completely separated from each other, whereby both the machine and the person are designated labels X and Y. This means that he does not know which one is the machine and which one is the person at the beginning of the game. The interrogator’s objective is to distinguish between the two using a series of questions on the machine and the other person as well. The questions could be of the form â€Å"Will X please tell me whether X plays chess?† (Oppy Graham, Dowe David, 2011, The Turing Test, para. 7). Both must answer the question. The machine’s objective is to try and convince the interrogator that it’s indeed the other person, while the person tries to help him identify correctly which one is the machine. If the interrogator fails to reliably tell the machine from the human, then the machine is said to have passed the test. The test does not check the ability to give the correct answer; however it checks how closely the answer resembles that of a typical human answer. ... The technology available now is far from achieving a credible human-like conversation for five minutes as Turing believed it would. The dynamics of human conversation are far too complex as factors like arrangement of words come into play. This can be well observed in the Loebner Prize Competition; an annual event in which computer programs are submitted to the Turing Test. Such competitions have catalysed the growth of AI technology substantially over the years, whereby programs like ELIZA came up. In 1997, one exceptional program called CONVERSE, developed by David Levi and his team, including a well-known researcher in computational linguistics, Yorick Wilks, won the Loebner Prize competition (William J. Rapaport, 2005, The Turing Test). Turing’s experiments focuses mainly on an AI machine’s ability to understand natural language. However this test has undergone some objections over time whereby some people suggest that it is chauvinistic i.e. it only recognizes inte lligence in things that have the capacity to sustain a conversation with humans. Others thought that the Turing Test is not sufficiently demanding. Turing (1950) however considered possible objections to his claim that machines can â€Å"think†. He went ahead and labelled them such as; The Theological objection, the â€Å"Heads in the sand† objection, The Argument from Consciousness, Arguments from Various Disabilities, Lady Lovelace's Objection, Argument from Continuity of the Nervous System, The Argument from Informality of Behaviour and finally, The Argument from Extra-Sensory Perception (Oppy & Dowe, 2011, Turing (1950) and Responses to Objections, para.1). A rather simplified