March 30, 2012 5:22 PM  A Reflection on Alan Turing, the Turing
Test, and Machine Intelligence  Alan Turing  In 1950, Alan
Turing published a paper that launched the discipline of
artificial intelligence, Computing Machinery and Intelligence.
If you have not read this paper, go and do so. Now. 2012 is the
centennial of Turing's birth, and you owe yourself a read of
this seminal paper as part of the celebration. It is a wonderful
work from a wonderful mind.  This paper gave us the Imitation
Game, an attempt to replace the question of whether a computer
could be intelligent by withn something more concrete: a probing
dialogue. The Imitation became the Turing Test, now a staple of
modern culture and the inspiration for contests and analogies
and speculation. After reading the paper, you will understand
something that many people do not: Turing is not describing a
way for us to tell the difference between human intelligence and
machine intelligence. He is telling us that the distinction is
not as important as we