Ask Hackaday: Program Passes Turing Test, But Is It Intelligent?

June 9, 2014 by Will Sweatman 119 Comments

A team based in Russia has developed a program that has passed the iconic Turing Test. The test was carried out at the Royal Society in London, and was able to convince 33 percent of the judges that it was a 13-year-old Ukrainian boy named Eugene Goostman.

The Turing Test was developed by [Alan Turing] in 1950 as an existence proof for intelligence: if a computer can fool a human operator into thinking it’s human, then by definition the computer must be intelligent. It should be noted that [Turing] did not address what intelligence was, but only tried to identify human like behavior in a machine.

Thirty years later, a philosopher by the name of [John Searle] pointed out that even a machine that could pass the Turing Test would still not be intelligent. He did this through a fascinating thought experiment called “The Chinese Room“.

Continue reading “Ask Hackaday: Program Passes Turing Test, But Is It Intelligent?” →

Mechanical Turing Machine Can Compute Anything…slowly

March 25, 2011 by Mike Nathan 12 Comments

mechanical_turing_machine

For several years, [Jim] has wanted to construct a fully-mechanical universal Turing machine. Without the help of any electronic circuits or electrical input, his goal was to build the machine using simple hand tools and scrap materials.

If you are not familiar with the concept of a Turing machine, they are devices that manipulate symbols or input from a strip of tape, according to a set table of rules. By definition, a Turing machine should be adaptable to simulate the logic of any computer algorithm, albeit in a much slower fashion than you would see from a computer.

He has replaced the strip of tape with a wire grid, and the symbols have been implemented in the form of ball bearings placed on the aforementioned grid. His hand-cranked machine uses magnets to lift the input symbols from the grid, processing them according to the rules table he routed out of a wood block.

The implementation is definitely clever, though [Jim] admits it is not without its problems. He took it to Maker Faire UK, and most people didn’t quite understand what they were seeing without a full explanation. The machine is not quite as reliable as he would like it to be, and he would like to make it a bit more powerful as it currently would take months to add two numbers together.

Keep reading to see a brief video demo of his Turing machine in action, and check out his blog if you want to see more information on how the machine was built.

Interested in seeing more Turing machines? Check out these two machines we featured a while back.

Continue reading “Mechanical Turing Machine Can Compute Anything…slowly” →

NXT Turing Machine

November 30, 2009 by Jake W 20 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYw2ewoO6c4]

This interesting use of Lego popped up on the mailing list of the University of Bergen. Build by a group of Norwegian Danish students, it’s a simple computer that implements Alan Turing’s design from 1937. Having both read and write functions, it implements its own (somewhat inefficient) medium of non-volatile memory. What we find interesting is that rather than move the ‘tape’ through the machine, the machine rolls over the tape. Thanks to [Thorsten] for the tip.