Year: 2005
Type: book-review
Abstract: This eagerly awaited anthology, while surely not the last word on the Turing Test, equally surely deserves to become the principal source of information on the test.It includes not only Turing's classic paper, but a fine selection of the main replies to date, all tied together by an engaging and penetrating essay by the editor.Stuart M. Shieber's name is well known to computational linguists for his research and to computer scientists more generally for his debate on the Loebner Turing Test competition, which appeared a decade earlier in Communications of the ACM (Shieber 1994a(Shieber , 1994b;;Loebner 1994). 1 With this collection, I expect it to become equally well known to philosophers.The collection begins with historical "precursors" to Turing's paper: two pieces by Descartes-his Discourse on the Method, Chap.V (1637), and his "Letter to the Marquess of Newcastle"-followed by selections from La Mettrie's Machine Man (1748).The second part contains the centerpiece: Turing's 1950 paper from Mind, "Computing Machinery and Intelligence," accompanied by three "ephemera": two early (1951) and difficult-to-find articles by Turing-"Intelligent Machinery, a Heretical Theory" and "Can Digital Computers Think?"-and a transcript of a 1952 BBC radio interview with Turing, M. H. A. Newman, Sir Geoffrey Jefferson, and R. B. Braithwaite, "Can automatic Calculating Machines Be Said to Think?" Shieber's presentation of the pièce de résistance (Turing 1950) devotes great attention to the sanctity of the text and is replete with scholarly paraphernalia comparing his carefully edited reprint with the original (which, by the way, is now available online, courtesy of JSTOR.org).The third, and final, part contains the immediate reactions to Turing's Mind paper as they appeared in that journal, followed by now-classic responses and some more-recent, important papers, some arranged chronologically, others logically.The first published response was Leonard Pinsky's early (1951)-and satirical-"Do Machines Think about Machines Thinking?" for which Shieber offers a brief, wry introduction.Next we have a quartet consisting of Keith Gunderson's important "The Imitation Game" (1964), Richard Purtill's response ("Beating the Imitation Game," 1971), and Geoffrey Sampson's ("In Defence of Turing") and P. H. Millar's ("On the Point of the Imitation Game") 1973 replies to Purtill.Jumping ahead a couple of decades comes Robert M. French's 1990 "Subcognition and the Limits of the Turing Test."Next, in more of a logical than a chronological order, comes a trio consisting of John 1 Interestingly, neither Loebner nor his competition are mentioned by name, or even discussed, in the book under review, though there is a citation to Shieber 1994a.
Source: Computational Linguistics
Author: William J. Rapaport
Institution: University at Buffalo, State University of New York
Language: English
Subfield: History and Philosophy of Science
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W1508649316