The most popular and comprehensive Open Source ECM platform
Let us know more
Machine Intelligence: Will Machines Soon Be Able to Ace the Turing Test?
In a 1950 paper, Alan Turing proposed the question ‘Can machines think?’. That question inspired scientists and engineers working in the field of ‘artificial intelligence’. Turing proposed that a machine could be considered as able to ‘think’ if it could interact and communicate with humans, like a human, on a free range of topics. Turing was a mathematician and logician. He is credited with formalizing the ideas of “algorithm” and “computation”. 2012 marks what would have been Alan Turing’s 100th birthday. An on-line petition is attempting to put Turing’s face on UK’s 10 pound note.
Now more than 60 years later, with technologies like IBM’s Watson and Apple’s Siri becoming common place and as Big Data pushes boundaries of how data can be analyzed and interpreted, we may be closing in on the sort of machine intelligence that Turing envisioned. A project at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst is one example — they have undertaken to build a ‘super’ Turing Machine.
Robert French, a cognitive scientist at the French National Center for Scientific Research, wrote in an article for Science magazine that “Two revolutionary advances in information technology may bring the Turing test out of retirement. The first is the ready availability of vast amounts of raw data — from video feeds to complete sound environments, and from casual conversations to technical documents on every conceivable subject. The second is the advent of sophisticated techniques for collecting, organizing, and processing this rich collection of data.”
Marcus du Sautoy, Simonyi professor and professor of mathematics at the University of Oxford, wrote for the Guardian that “Turing might be disappointed that in his centenary year there are no machines that can pass themselves off as humans but I think that he would be more excited by the new direction artificial intelligence has taken. The AI community is no longer obsessed with reproducing human intelligence, the product of millions of years of evolution, but rather in evolving something new and potentially much more exciting.”
