Who invented the Turing test? Turing test questions

Probably, today not such person whoAt least once I have not heard of such a concept as Alan Turing's test. Probably, the majority, in general, is far from understanding what a testing system is. Therefore, we will dwell on it in somewhat more detail.

What is a Turing test: the basic concept

Back in the late 40-ies of the last century verymany scientists have been dealing with the problems of the first computer development. It was then that one of the members of some non-governmental group Ratio Club, engaged in research in the field of cybernetics, asked a perfectly logical question: Is it possible to create a machine that would think like a person, or at least imitate his behavior?

Do I need to say who invented the Turing test? Apparently not. The following principle was taken for the initial basis of the whole concept, which is still relevant today: can a person, for some time, communicate with an invisible interlocutor on completely different arbitrary topics, determine who is a real person or machine in front of him? In other words, the question is not just to simulate the machine behavior of a real person, but also to find out whether she can think for herself. No doubt, this issue remains controversial until now.

History of creation

In general, if we consider the Turing test asan empirical system for determining the "human" capabilities of a computer, it is worth saying that the indirect basis for its creation was the curious statements of the philosopher Alfred Ayer, which he formulated as early as 1936.

Sam Ayer compared, so to speak, life experiencedifferent people, and on the basis of this expressed the opinion that the soulless machine can not pass any test, because it can not think. At best, it will be pure imitation water.

In principle, so it is. To create a thinking machine, one imitation is not enough. Very many scientists, as an example, lead the Wright brothers who built the first plane, abandoning the tendency to imitate birds, which, by the way, was peculiar to such a genius as Leonardo da Vinci.

Istria does not say whether Alan Turing himself knew(1912-1954) on these postulates, nevertheless in 1950 he compiled a whole system of questions that could determine the degree of "humanization" of the machine. And I must say, this development is still one of the fundamental, although already in testing, for example, computer bots, etc. In reality, the principle turned out to be such that only a few programs managed to pass the Turing test. And then, "go through" - said with great reserve, because the result of testing has never had a rate of 100 percent, at best - just over 50.

At the very beginning of his studies, the scientistused his own invention. It was called the "Turing test machine." Since all conversations were supposed to be introduced exclusively in printed form, the scientist asked several basic directives on writing answers, such as moving a printed tape left or right, printing a certain symbol, etc.

ELIZA and PARRY programs

Over time, programs began to become more complex, and two of them, in situations where the Turing test was applied, showed striking results at the time. These became ELIZA and PARRY.

As for "Eliza", created in 1960: on the basis of the question, the machine had to determine the keyword and based on it to draw up a reverse answer. It was this that made it possible to deceive real people. If there was no such word, the machine returned a generalized answer or repeated one of the previous ones. However, the passing of the "Elise" test is still in doubt, since the real people who communicated with the program were initially prepared psychologically in such a way that they thought in advance that they were talking to a person, not a car.

The PARRY program is somewhat similar to "Eliza", butwas created to simulate paranoid communication. What is most interesting, real patients of clinics were used for its testing. After recording transcripts of conversations in teletype mode, they were assessed by professional psychiatrists. Only in 48 percent of cases they were able to correctly assess where the person is, and where the machine is.

In addition, almost all the programs of that time worked with a certain period of time, since people in those days thought much faster than the machine. Now - on the contrary.

Supercomputers Deep Blue and Watson

Interesting enough to look at the development of IBM, which is not something to think, but had incredible processing power.

Probably, many remember how in 1997supercomputer Deep Blue won 6 games in chess at then-current world champion Garry Kasparov. Actually, the Turing test is applicable to this machine very conditionally. The thing is that it originally was embedded in a lot of templates of parties with an incredible amount of interpretation of the development of events. The car could estimate the order of 200 million positions of figures on a board in a second!

Computer Watson, consisting of 360 processors and90 servers, won the American TV quiz, having bypassed all the other two participants, for which, in fact, he received a $ 1 million prize. Again, the question is controversial, since incredible volumes of encyclopedic data were put into the machine, and the machine simply analyzed the question for the presence of a keyword, synonyms or generalized coincidences, and then gave the correct answer.

Emulator Eugene Goostman

One of the most interesting events in this fieldwas the program of Odessa Eugene Gustman and Russian engineer Vladimir Veselov, now living in the US, which imitated the identity of a 13-year-old boy.

On June 7, 2014, the Eugene program showed itsopportunities in full. Interestingly, 5 bots and 30 real people took part in the testing. Only in 33% of cases out of a hundred juries could determine that this is a computer. The point here is that the task was complicated by the fact that the child's intellect is lower than that of an adult person, and even less knowledge.

The questions of the Turing test were the most common,However, for Eugene (Euegene) there were some specific questions about the events in Odessa, which could not have been overlooked by any inhabitant. But the answers were still made to think that the jury was a child. So, for example, the program answered the question of residence right away. The code was asked whether the interlocutor of a certain number was in the city, the program stated that he did not want to talk about it. When the interlocutor tried to insist on a conversation in line with what exactly happened on that day, Eugene disowned himself by saying that they should know for themselves what to ask him? In general, the child's emulator turned out to be extremely successful.

Nevertheless, it's still an emulator, not a thinking creature. So the uprising of the machines will not take very long.

but on the other hand

Finally it remains to add that whilethere are no prerequisites for creating thinking machines in the near future. Nevertheless, if before recognition issues were related to machines, now that you are not a machine, you have to prove to almost every one of us. Look at least to input captcha on the Internet to gain access to some action. While it is believed that no electronic device has been created yet, capable of recognizing a twisted text or a set of symbols other than a human. But who knows, everything is possible ...