If Not Turing's Test, Then What?

13 years 4 months ago

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If it is true that good problems produce good science, then it will be worthwhile to identify good problems, and even more worthwhile to discover the attributes that make them good problems. This discovery process is necessarily empirical, so we examine several challenge problems, beginning with Turing's famous test, and more than a dozen attributes that challenge problems might have. We are led to a contrast between research strategies -- the successful "divide and conquer" strategy and the promising but largely untested "developmental" strategy -- and we conclude that good challenge problems encourage the latter strategy. 1 Turing's test: Our first challenge More than fifty years ago, Alan Turing proposed a clever test of the proposition that machines can think [7]. He wanted the proposition to be an empirical one and he particularly wanted to avoid haggling over what it means for anything to think. Turing first introduced a game in which a man and a wo...

Paul R. Cohen

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