2.2 The Imitation Game

According to you, can machines think?

In 1950, the mathematician Alan Turing asked himself the same question—and to answer it, he invented an experiment that is also a game.

A man and a woman are placed in one room, while a third person—whom we’ll call the judge—is in another room, separated from the first two. The judge cannot see or hear either of them: the only way to communicate is through typed messages. The judge’s task is to figure out which of the two is the woman. But it’s not easy: in this game, both players must convince the judge that they are the woman—she without lying, and he by trying to imitate the way a woman would respond.

This is why Turing called it the imitation game.

Now comes the difficult part.

Turing wondered: what would happen if we replaced the man with a machine? Would the machine be better or worse at pretending to be a woman?

According to Turing, if a machine could play the imitation game as successfully as a human, then we could say that the machine is capable of thinking.

In this section of the exhibition, you can try a reinterpreted version of the Turing test. If ChatGPT wins the imitation game… do you believe it can think?