270 | 25 INTEllIGENT mACHINERy
The Turing test is extremely tough for a computer to pass. We humans find idle chit-chat
across the dinner table easy, but if one steps back and considers what is involved one real-
izes that, even in quite trivial conversations, we are manipulating vast amounts of knowledge,
and are effortlessly producing and comprehending complex linguistic structures, often highly
idiomatic ones, as well as expertly handling such obstacles to comprehension as irony, meta-
phor, creative humour, malformed or unfinished sentences, and abrupt and unannounced
changes of subject. None of these, with the possible exception of the first, are things that today’s
computers excel at.
Here is Turing’s own example of the sort of conversation that could occur between a judge
and a computer that successfully evades identification:^29
Judge: In the first line of your sonnet which reads ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s
day’, would not ‘a spring day’ do as well or better?
Machine: It wouldn’t scan.
Judge: How about ‘a winter’s day’? That would scan all right.
Machine: Yes, but nobody wants to be compared to a winter’s day.
Judge: Would you say Mr Pickwick reminded you of Christmas?
Machine: In a way.The job of the human
contestant is to help
the judge unmask the
computer My hair is blondeand today I’m wearing,
it in a pony ta ilfigure 25.2 The Turing test. The judge must decide which contestant is the computer.
Dustin Parry and Jack Copeland. All rights reserved.