The Imitation Game

Instead of defining thinking, he asked a different question: can you tell the difference?

He called it the Imitation Game. An interrogator sits in one room. In two other rooms: two people. The interrogator can only communicate with them through typed messages, and has to guess which is which.

Now swap one of the people out for a machine. The interrogator still asks the same questions. The machine tries to respond exactly as a person would.

If the interrogator cannot tell the difference, Turing argued, then asking whether the machine is "really" thinking becomes an empty question. You have no way to check. You have no way to even say what "really" would mean. All you have is the behaviour, and the behaviour is identical.

We judge other people’s minds the same way. You cannot see inside anyone else’s head. You assume they think because of how they act. If a machine acts the same way, what exactly is missing?