TuringComplete

This is an edited version of a piece by me that appeared in the Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery, Vol 37, No 9 in 1994.

I recall asking my six-year-old, "How do you know that you are?" She considered the matter in silence for several minutes, occasionally drawing breath to say something and then thinking the better of it, whilst I conducted an internal battle against the Demon of False Pedagogy that was prompting me to make helpful suggestions. Eventually she smiled and said, "Because I can ask myself the question." 

Even with the usual caveats about parental pride, I consider that this Cartesian answer was genuine evidence of intelligent thought. But she doesn't do that every day, or even every week. And no more do the rest of us. Intelligent thought is rare. That is why we value it. 

The most important aspect of Turing's proposed test was his suggestion that it should go on for a long time. Speaking, reading, and writing are very low-bandwidth means of communication, and it may take hours or even days for a bright and original idea to emerge from them. We should also remember that there are many people with whom one could talk for the whole of their lives without hearing very much that was interesting or profound. 

The distress caused to researchers from Joseph Weizenbaum himself onwards by the ease with which really dumb programs such as ELIZA can hold sensible (if short) conversations has always been rather amusing. The point is surely not that such programs are poor models of intelligence, but that most of us act like such programs most of the time — a relaxed conversation often consists of little more than a speaker's words firing off a couple of random associations in a listener's mind; the listener then transposes a few pronouns and other ideas about and speaks the result in turn. In speech we often don't bother to get our grammar right, either. ELIZA and her children mimic these processes rather well. 

The researchers' distress arises because — in the main — they take a masculine view of conversation, namely that it is for communicating facts and ideas. But the most successful conversation-mimicking programs take a feminine view of conversation, namely that it is for engendering friendship and sympathy between the conversationalists (see, for example, You Just Don't Understand—Women and Men in Conversation by Deborah Tannen). Of these two equal aspects of conversation, the latter happens to turn out to be the easier to code. Of course the resulting programs don't really "feel" friendship and sympathy. But then, perhaps neither do counselors or analysts. 

I suspect that a real Turing Test passing program will end up coloring moods by switching between lots of ELIZA and PARRY and RACTER processes in the foreground to keep the conversation afloat, while the deep-thought processes (which we haven't got a clue how to program yet) generate red-hot ideas at the rate of two per year in the background. What's more, I suspect that's more or less how most of us work too, and that if the deep bit is missing altogether in some people, the fact hardly registers in quotidian chatter.