Beyond Turing

摘要

Last Saturday I took part in a battle of wits at Bletchley Park, the stately home that housed the UK's codebreakers during the second world war. I was a judge in the annual Loebner prize competition, held to determine whether computers can think just like a human. It probably won't surprise you that they can't, but machines are increasingly giving us a run for our money at certain tasks. Bletchley is a fitting arena: the competition is based on a test proposed by mathematician and computing pioneer Alan Turing, who spent the war there cracking Nazi codes. He argued that if a computer could fool a person into believing it was human, it could think.