Ni\'epce-Bell or Turing: How to Test Odor Reproduction?

Abstract

In a 1950 article in Mind, decades before the existence of anything resembling an artificial intelligence system, Alan Turing addressed the question of how to test whether machines can think, or in modern terminology, whether a computer claimed to exhibit intelligence indeed does so. The current paper raises the analogous issue for olfaction: how to test the validity of a system claimed to reproduce arbitrary odors artificially, in a way recognizable to humans, in face of the unavailability of a general naming method for odors. Although odor reproduction systems are still far from being viable, the question of how to test candidates thereof is claimed to be interesting and nontrivial, and a novel method is proposed. To some extent, the method is inspired by Turing`s test for AI, in that it involves a human challenger and the real and artificial entities, yet it is very different: our test is conditional, requiring from the artificial no more than is required from the original, and it employs a novel method of immersion that takes advantage of the availability of near-perfect reproduction methods for sight and sound.