Turing's First Imitation Game: Design Concepts and a Human-Approximates-Machine Reading

Abstract

This paper examines Turing's 1948 report, "Intelligent Machinery", as an important conceptual source for the later imitation games. Its first contribution is to identify and integrate the design concepts underlying the 1948 chess-based imitation game: the possibility that intelligent machines may make mistakes, the exclusion of irrelevant physical features, the role of the human judge, and Turing's claim that intellectual activity consists mainly of search. The paper's second contribution is to argue that restricting the human contestant to a rather poor chess player increases the role of intellectual search and makes human behaviour more comparable to machine behaviour. This interpretation presents the 1948 game as a human-approximates-machine game and suggests that the imitation game framework can be used not only to ask whether machines imitate humans, but also to examine when human intelligence becomes machine-like under specific task constraints.