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Doing Justice to the Imitation Game

A Farewell to Formalism

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Parsing the Turing Test

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Abstract

My claim in this article is that the 1950 paper in which Turing describes the world-famous set-up of the Imitation Game is much richer and intriguing than the formalist ersatz coined in the early 1970s under the name “Turing Test”. Therefore, doing justice to the Imitation Game implies showing first, that the formalist interpretation misses some crucial points in Turing’s line of thought and second, that the 1950 paper should not be understood as the Magna Chartaof strong Artificial Intelligence (AI) but as a work in progressfocused on the notion of Form. This has unexpected consequences about the status of Mind, and from a more general point of view, about the way we interpret the notions of Science and Language.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Laboratoire CREA-CNRS, Ecole Polytechnique, Paris, France

    Jean Lassègue

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  1. Jean Lassègue
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of California, San Diego, CA, USA

    Robert Epstein

  2. Teradata Corporation, San Diego, CA, USA

    Gary Roberts

  3. Gartner Consulting, Stamford, CT, USA

    Grace Beber

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Lassègue, J. (2009). Doing Justice to the Imitation Game. In: Epstein, R., Roberts, G., Beber, G. (eds) Parsing the Turing Test. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-6710-5_11

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-6710-5_11

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