I was looking into the Alan Turing and his Turing test as he proposed and reading some books. I feel skeptical regarding the fact that we have even reached at the level of Artificial Intelligence. It feels like we have not created a Turing machine yet.
The Turing machine, and the Turing test are two very different things. They’ve been both coined by Alan Turing. But a Turing machine doesn’t have anything to do with AI. It’s a computer that can do any possible maths calculation. But it requires infinite memory. And since nothing is infinite in the real world, it doesn’t exist. (Einstein might disagree.)
The Turing test, or “imitation game” is a hypothetical experiment setup. At least it was hypothetical back in the day. It tells us whether some machine can imitate human dialogue well enough to fool someone into thinking they’re talking to a human.
To add a bit to this: I don’t see a reason to stay “skeptical” about this. It’s an experiment. And it’s not even hard to set it up. You can just try and learn the answer to it.
It’s a bit tricky since some details are vague and there’s some variations of it. It’s more a party game than written down with mathematical precision, like other texts from Turing.
What I’d be sceptical of, is the implications of it. And claims from big companies who have a vested interest in promoting their products. It’s not really influential science until it’s been replicated by other (independant) researchers and been peer-reviewed.
Adam Turing
I think you mean “Alan”, friend
thx! corrected.
The idea with Turing machine is that anything a Turing machine can do, a computer can also do. It is a mathematical construct representing a computer. He used it to prove that some problems can’t be solved with computation alone (halting problem is one of these), thus proving there’s fundamental limitations to computing.
Turing test is mostly an interesting thought experiment. Don’t read too much into it.
well I am a computer science student and AI is quite trending subsection of CS so I wanna be really educated so that I don’t get fooled by tech bros
Pay attention to your professors, then. I guess they’re about to teach you what a Turing machine is. And what “AI” is, though from my experience, that term isn’t thrown around in CS nearly as much. It’s kind of a buzzword, and intelligence is ill-defined… Instead you’d get a lecture on machine learning, or deep learning or whatever. And you’ll get a headache from all the maths and statistics required to do machine learning. It’s not all that hard. But it can get involved. There’s also a fascinating history to learn. “AI” didn’t always mean ChatGPT.
The comments in here are confusing. To state it plainly:
Turing machines have nothing to do with the Turing test. They’re two completely different things/concepts, just named after the same guy.
The Turing test is more showing how well a program can convince a person they are human. Clearly the past few years has shown that people can be easily fooled in many ways. The test was never meant as an indication of intelligence behind the messages, only whether or not they were good simulations of human discussion. The 2025 version of ChatGPT rated 73% on such tests, and I imagine it and other LLMs might do even better now with the extra tools they use to help context and memory. They still aren’t “thinking”. They’re doing something though, and the usual “just a complex autocomplete” dismissal isn’t recognizing that.
I heard that the current version of Turing test is not what Alan Turing himself proposed originally.
It’s all bulllshit. There is no “AI”.
so what’s your question?
Is current AI the Turing machine or not?
a turing machine is a theoretical device that can perform any computation. a language model is a set of matrix multiplications that takes a list of words and gives back the statistically most likely next word.
your question is like asking if novels have become language.
is AI novel or language?
sorry i should have expanded on that:
turing machines are conceptual, like language. they are a theoretical means to formalise and generalise an idea (meaningful computation/communication).
language models are real, like novels. they are one possible use of the concept (word prediction/telling a story).
a novel is a specific implementation of some parts of the idea of language, like a language model is a specific implementation of some parts of the idea of computation embodied by the turing machine concept.
- Turing Machine - Groundbreaking mathematical/CS advancement.
- Turing Test - Vague analogy hyped by pseudo-scientific grifters (aka the “AI” industry).
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