Letter to TLS, Nov 4 2011:
“Stevan Harnad misstates the criteria for the Turing Test when he describes a sensing robot that could pass the test by recognizing and interacting with people and objects in the same way that a human can (October 21). Alan Turingās formulation of the Turing Test specifies a computer with no sensors or robotic apparatus. Such a computer passes the test by successfully imitating a human in text-only conversation over a terminal.
“Significantly, and contrary to Harnadās formulation, no referential āgroundingā of symbols is required to pass the Turing TestDavid Auerbach 472 9th Street, New York 11215.
David Auerbach (TLS Letters, November 4) is quite right that in his original 1950 formulation, what Turing had called the “Imitation Game” (since dubbed the “Turing Test”) tested only verbal capacity, not robotic (sensory/motor) capacity: only symbols in and symbols out, as in today’s email exchanges. Turing’s idea was that if people were completely unable to tell a computer apart from a real, live pen-pal through verbal exchanges alone, the computer would really be thinking. Auerbach is also right that — in principle — if the verbal test could indeed be successfully passed through internal computation (symbol-manipulation) alone, then there may be no need to test with robotic interactions whether the computer’s symbols were “grounded” in the things in the world to which they referred. But 2012 is Alan Turing Year, the centenary of his birth. And 62 years since it was published, his original agenda for what is now called “cognitive science” has been evolving. Contrary to Turing’s predictions, we are still nowhere near passing his test and there are by now many reasons to believe that although being able to pass the verbal version might indeed be evidence enough that thinking is going on, robotic grounding will be needed in order to actually be able to pass the verbal test, even if the underlying robotic capacity is not tested directly. To believe otherwise is to imagine that it would be possible to talk coherently about the things in the world without ever being able to see, hear, touch, taste or smell any of them (or anything at all).
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