I don’t really need a reason to blog about Alan Turing and Turing Machines, you know, the idea that if you ask questions of something, and if you can’t tell whether it’s a human being or not, it’s the intellectual equivalent of a human being.
But I’m blogging about it anyway because this guy’s site came up very high in a Google™ search on “Cockles and muscles,” by which I hoped to find the old Irish dittie about Molly Malone that I’ve been singing for the neighbors’ enjoyment.
Update: I think I was already too Irish when I wrote this—a Turing Machine is just a system that can execute all of the instructions necessary to be a Universal Computer—in other words, everything that’s not excluded by Goedel’s Theorem of Incompleteness. The Turing Test is the one that says if you put slips of paper with English on them into a slot in the wall, and slips of paper with accurate translations into Chinese come back out of the slot, you have to assume that there’s a human translator in there who knows both English and Chinese, and if it’s simply a machine, that doesn’t matter.