Download Write-Up 2: Summary of “Computing machinery and intelligence

Write-Up 2: Summary of “Computing machinery and intelligence” (Turing, 1950)
Saša Milić
As the essay “Computing machinery and intelligence” opens, Alan Turing quickly transitions
from considering the question Can machines think? to considering what he believes to be
a “closely related” question: Can a machine pass the ‘imitation game’ (or what we know as
the Turing Test)?. He then offers justification for the replacement—claiming the original is
“too meaningless to deserve discussion”—and answers yes to his reformulated question. It
can be reasonably assumed that a machine capable of passing the “imitation game” would
necessarily have to have a human-like command of natural language.
In his paper, Turing considers opposing arguments in detail. Several of these opinions brush
upon the use of human language at its most profound: the use of emotional language, selfreflective language, creative and original language. These opponents argue a machine is
incapable of such expression. One argument considers the ‘fact’ that a machine is unemotional, unconscious; rendering the machine incapable of producing the emotional language
needed to, for example, “write a sonnet”. Another argument is presented in the form “you
will never get a machine to X”, where a number of possibilities are presented. Two of these
X ’s are given special consideration by Turing: “be the subject of its own thought” and “do
something really new”. Ada Lovelace argues a machine is incapable of originality because a
machine does “whatever we know how to order it to”. It can be argued that the inability to
produce self-reflective and original/creative language precludes a machine from using natural
language in all of the many ways a human might.
After rebutting the above objections to the notion of an intelligent machine, Turing offers
his own reasoning as to how such a machine could be designed. After arguing hardware is
not an obstacle, Turing outlines a process that he believes would result in the creation of
something comparable to an adult human brain–a brain capable of understanding and using
natural language the way a human might. He reduces the problem of creating such a brain
into two parts: the “child-programme” and the “education process”. The “child machine”
could be arrived at through a speedier implementation of natural selection. The machine
could then be taught through some sort of a teaching process similar, but not identical, to
the teaching administered to human children.
Discussion Questions: 1) How did Turing expect to resolve an error occurring in the “education process”: was it a problem with the initial “child-programme” or a problem with
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the education process itself? 2) Turing divides the ‘evolution’ of the adult human mind into
three components (p. 455). Is this division reasonable? 3) Could the artificial evolutionary
process Turing describes (p. 456) somehow be less expeditious than natural evolution?
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