

Turing's proposed thought experiment encapsulates the issues that the writings in The Turing Test define and discuss. He was not, as is often assumed, answering the question Can machines think? but proposing a more concrete way to ask it. Following Descartes's dictum that it is the ability to speak that distinguishes human from beast, Turing proposed to test whether machine and person were indistinguishable in regard to verbal ability. Alan Turing's idea, originally expressed in a 1950 paper titled Computing Machinery and Intelligence and published in the journal Mind, proposed an indistinguishability test that compared artifact and person. The writings collected by Stuart Shieber for this book examine the profound philosophical issues surrounding the Turing Test as a criterion for intelligence. The Turing Test is part of the vocabulary of popular culture-it has appeared in works ranging from the Broadway play Breaking the Code to the comic strip Robotman. Historical and contemporary papers on the philosophical issues raised by the Turing Test as a criterion for intelligence.
