Turing Test for Dogs

A good, punchy, witty reminder from Existential Comics that most people who drone on about the ‘Turing Test’, particularly news reports that some new software has ‘passed the Turing Test’, have never even read, let alone understood, Turing’s original 1950 paper.

Just to recap on a few essentials:

• The ‘Turing Test’, even by today’s common interpretation, relies on a human decision-maker, whose sophisitication in recognising AI presumably increases with the development of AI itself.  It isn’t precise enough to be a ‘test’.  It never was a ‘test’.
• Turing himself, never proposed any ‘test’, merely an illustrative game to compare impressions of intelligence.
• The figures Turing gave were a prediction of what might be possible, not a benchmark for passing any ‘test’.
• There is no ‘Turing Test’.

Read the paper!