The Basics of Machine Intelligence

Abstract

First, we must define what we mean by intelligent machines. In 1950 the British mathematician Alan Turing concluded that the question “Can Machines think?” has ambiguous meaning, so he offered his Turing Test as a less ambiguous substitute.¹ In his test, a human tester communicates via an electronic chat session with an unknown entity, either a machine or another human. If the tester cannot distinguish the machine from another human, then the machine is judged as intelligent. During the past 50 years there have been numerous efforts to write computer programs that fool testers into thinking that they are human. Some of these programs, without being truly intelligent, have been successful against some testers.