The Turing Test
I'm killing time before I head down to London tomorrow morning and I'm in a mood that can only be described as super-bored and frisky, so I thought I'd write about an idea that's been gestating in my head for a few months now. Firstly a quick history lesson. Alan Turing was a British mathematician and computer scientist who is famous for his pioneering work with computers, not to mention his ground breaking work during the second world war at Bletchley Park in the field of code-breaking. This is the man who broke the Enigma code, so you know he was a smart guy. He was also a practicing homosexual in an era when it was criminalized for which he was eventually prosecuted, but that's by the by. Turing was fascinated by the idea of AI ( artificial intelligence) and he postulated that if a human could converse normally with a computer, without ever realising that it was not a human they were conversing with, then that computer would have reached a state of true artifi