The Profoundly Weird, Gender-Specific Roots of the Turing Test

malachiorion writes: Alan Turing never wrote about the Turing Test, that legendary measure of machine intelligence that researchers claimed to have passed last weekend. He proposed something much stranger — a contest between men and machines, to see who was better at pretending to be a woman. The details of the Imitation Game aren't secret, or even hard to find, and yet no one seems to reference it. This article explains why they should — in part because it's so odd, but also because it might be a better test for 'machines that think' than the chatbot-infested, seemingly useless Turing Test.

Comments

Re:How is that stranger?

[Immerman]

Try it the other way around - men and women's minds start from essentially the same foundation, but then diverge thanks to profoundly different optimal reproductive strategies (with all the contingent physical and hormonal differences evolution has thus adopted), cultural indoctrination, and no doubt myriad other minor factors. Certainly the standard deviation is greater than the population difference on many fronts, maybe most, but the distinction is undeniable to anyone closely and honestly involved with numerous members of both genders. Grab any two random individuals of opposite genders and you will almost certainly find certain characteristic differences between them.