Speaker 1: Welcome to Brainstuff production of I Heart Radio, Hey brain
Speaker 1: Stuff Lauren Vogelbaum here. The Turning test is legendary in
Speaker 1: the field of artificial intelligence. First proposed by the visionary
Speaker 1: British mathematician Alan Turning in a landmark nineteen fifty paper.
Speaker 1: The test provides a practical and pretty fun way to
Speaker 1: determine if a computer has achieved human levels of intelligence.
Speaker 1: Turing called it the imitation game. If a computer, through
Speaker 1: a text only chat, can convince a human that it's
Speaker 1: a real person, then it passes the test. Simple in
Speaker 1: theory but nearly impossible in practice. Turning came up with
Speaker 1: the imitation game in response to colleagues and critics in
Speaker 1: the late nineteen forties who insisted that a machine could
Speaker 1: never be truly intelligent. But Turning had more faith in
Speaker 1: these primitive new machines he called digital computers. That's because
Speaker 1: Turing was the very first to envision something that we
Speaker 1: take for granted today, a single machine that can be
Speaker 1: programmed to do almost anything. Odds are yours sing to
Speaker 1: this podcast on just such a machine? In brief, Alan
Speaker 1: Turing was a British mathematician who came up with the
Speaker 1: idea of modern computing, and whose code breaking played a
Speaker 1: major role in the Allied victory over the Nazis in
Speaker 1: World War Two. Also, he was a world class cross
Speaker 1: country runner who may have qualified for the nineteen forty
Speaker 1: Olympics if not for an injury. But his life was
Speaker 1: also tragic due to prejudices of the time. He was
Speaker 1: prosecuted in nineteen fifty two for having an affair with
Speaker 1: another man home sexual acts being illegal in Britain until
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty seven, and he accepted a form of chemical
Speaker 1: castration as a condition of probation in order to avoid
Speaker 1: jail time. His security clearance was revoked, ending his work
Speaker 1: for the British government. He was found dead of cyanid
Speaker 1: poisoning in nineteen fifty four, though it's still unclear whether
Speaker 1: his death was a suicide or an accident. He was
Speaker 1: pardoned of his conviction by Queen Elizabeth. The second Turing
Speaker 1: was writing about computers well before any such thing existed.
Speaker 1: Back in nineteen thirty six, he introduced the concept of
Speaker 1: the univer soul computing machine and a dense mathematical paper
Speaker 1: called on Computable Numbers with an application to the chitons problem.
Speaker 1: This was a decade before the first electronic computer would
Speaker 1: be built. Turning wrote, according to my definition, a number
Speaker 1: is computable if its decimal can be written down by
Speaker 1: a machine. It is possible to invent a single machine
Speaker 1: which can be used to compute any computable sequence. Turing's
Speaker 1: definition of computability of something that a computer can do
Speaker 1: is what's known today as an algorithm. Turning was the
Speaker 1: first to lay out the design framework of a machine
Speaker 1: that could be programmed to run a series of discrete
Speaker 1: algorithms in order to achieve a desired task. Other mathematicians
Speaker 1: and engineers had toyed with calculating machines, most famously Charles
Speaker 1: Babbage's nineteenth century analytical engine, but Turing envisioned a device
Speaker 1: that wasn't limited to solving one kind of problem. We
Speaker 1: spoke with Andrew Hodges, a mathematics professor at Oxford University
Speaker 1: an author of Alan Turing The Enigma, the inspiration for
Speaker 1: the Oscar winning film The Imitation Game. Hodges explained, anything
Speaker 1: you can describe as an algorithm can be done by
Speaker 1: one machine. The universal machine is essentially what we mean
Speaker 1: by a computer, now, something on which you can store
Speaker 1: the instructions and it carries them out, and no one
Speaker 1: else had formalized that idea. From the start, Turns universal
Speaker 1: machine was conceived as a very simplified form of artificial intelligence,
Speaker 1: even though that term wouldn't be coined until ninety six.
Speaker 1: Hodges says that the design of the universal machine was
Speaker 1: meant to imitate the inner workings of the human mind,
Speaker 1: a subject that fascinated Turing almost as much as mathematics.
Speaker 1: In fact, when describing how his universal machine would work,
Speaker 1: Turn used the term state of mind to label the
Speaker 1: different read and write functions of the machine. In Turn's
Speaker 1: conceptual machine, a length of tape is run through a
Speaker 1: read write scanner. The tape is inscribed with bits of
Speaker 1: information represented by symbols. The scanner head can either read
Speaker 1: the symbols or write new ones according to its state
Speaker 1: of mind. Turning wrote in his nineteen thirty six paper,
Speaker 1: the operation actually performed is determined by the state of
Speaker 1: mind of the computer and the observed symbols. In particular,
Speaker 1: they determine the state of mind of the computer after
Speaker 1: the operation is carried out. A decade later, when Turing
Speaker 1: was leading the stalled British effort to build one of
Speaker 1: the first electronic computers in nineteen forty six. He also
Speaker 1: studied neurology and human physiology on the side. The result
Speaker 1: was an internal paper published for the National Physical Laboratory
Speaker 1: that modeled how a computer could be programmed to learn
Speaker 1: on its own. Hod Just sees it as one of
Speaker 1: the earliest proposals of what are now called neural networks,
Speaker 1: a type of deep machine learning that's at the bleeding
Speaker 1: edge of artificial intelligence. Turing wasn't the only person intrigued
Speaker 1: by the similarities between human and machine intelligence. A surge
Speaker 1: of new technologies developed during World War Two, including early computers,
Speaker 1: space satellites, and nuclear power, had captured the intellectual and
Speaker 1: public imagination. Hodges said, as soon as computer as are
Speaker 1: mentioned at all, people are talking about electronic brains and
Speaker 1: the possibility of the computer rivaling the brain. The nineteen
Speaker 1: forty eight books Cybernetics by Norbert Wiener coined the prefix
Speaker 1: cyber and wondered whether it would be possible to quote
Speaker 1: construct a chess playing machine and whether this sort of
Speaker 1: ability represents an essential difference between the potentialities of the
Speaker 1: machine and the mind. Wiener concluded that such a machine
Speaker 1: might very well be as good a player as the
Speaker 1: vast majority of the human race. It was during this
Speaker 1: era of excitement and nervous speculation about superintelligent machines the
Speaker 1: Turning wrote Computing, Machinery and Intelligence, what Hodges calls one
Speaker 1: of the most cited papers in philosophical literature. Turning begins,
Speaker 1: I propose to consider the question can machines think? Then,
Speaker 1: since the definitions of machine and think are ambiguous, Turning
Speaker 1: narrows the scope of the question for his purposes. The
Speaker 1: machine must be a digital computer, and the test of
Speaker 1: whether or not it can think would be answered by
Speaker 1: the imitation game. The game game, now known as the
Speaker 1: Turning Test, is only mentioned briefly in the paper, and
Speaker 1: Hodges says that Turing didn't take the details of the
Speaker 1: test too seriously, publishing different versions in other papers. But
Speaker 1: Turning did like the playful simplicity of it. Hodges said,
Speaker 1: in a way he was making a drama out of it.
Speaker 1: It presented this idea of the possibility of advanced artificial
Speaker 1: intelligence in a way that engages people, and that ordinary
Speaker 1: people would make the decision like a jury in a trial.
Speaker 1: When the Turing Test was first published in nineteen fifty
Speaker 1: Turning himself was confident that intelligent machinery, as he called it,
Speaker 1: would be able to win the Invitation Game within fifty
Speaker 1: to a hundred years. So will his predictions come true?
Speaker 1: We already have super intelligent computers capable of outwitting the
Speaker 1: smartest players in other types of games. IBM's Deep Blue
Speaker 1: defeated the reigning chess champion Gary Kasparov, and Watson beat
Speaker 1: the record breaking Jeopardy champion Ken Jennings in two thousand eleven.
Speaker 1: But the Imitation Game raises the bar high on artificial intelligence,
Speaker 1: and no computer has come close to convincing an ordinary
Speaker 1: human that is one of us, at least not yet.
Speaker 1: An annual contest called the Loebner Prize conducts its own
Speaker 1: turing tests on the top chat bots to see if
Speaker 1: the latest AI software could convince a panel of judges
Speaker 1: that it's just as human as its human creators. None
Speaker 1: of the chat bots have succeeded. The best performer, a
Speaker 1: conversational chatbot called Mistaku, has only achieved a rating of
Speaker 1: thirty three human, but when our writer Dave went online
Speaker 1: to chat with her, he was impressed by her natural
Speaker 1: language responses and deep knowledge, albeit probably too deep for
Speaker 1: a typical dope human, he said. And when he asked
Speaker 1: her if a chat bot will ever pass the Turing test,
Speaker 1: she had the perfect answer, you be the judge of that.
Speaker 1: Today's episode written by Dave Ruse and produced by Tyler Clang.
Speaker 1: Brain Stuff is a production of I Heart Radios How
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