Can Machines Think?

When I began to read the book Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, 2rd Edition. There was a chapter or reviewing the history of AI.

It was well-known that during the gestation of AI, A.M. Turing's famous paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence was a milestone of AI. In our book, this paper was mentioned. It was introduced that the main content of it were Turing test, machine learning, genetic algorithm and reinforcement learning. I was attracted by its content, and urged reading it.

Last night, I found out and printed the paper. It had 22 papers. I could not help reading it last night. And then I read it during my spare time today. Just now, I had read through it. I had so many ideas about it, as follows:

1. The accuracy of defition. When you wanted to define a concept, you must define all the factors of your concept. For example, Turing proposed to consider the question, "Can machines think?" Then, in his paper, he used so many pages for discussion of "machine" and "think". To "think", Turing gave us the famous "Imitation Game", i.e., "Turing Test".

2. To the Imitation Game, Turing set up an accurate entironment of his game. He considered so many objections and analysis them one by one. Full consideration was prerequisite.

3. Turing gave the basic idea about learning machine. "The machine has to be so constructed that events which shortly preceded the occurrence if a punishment signal are unlikely to be repeated, whereas a reward signal increased the probability of repetition of the events which led up to it." Maybe his idea of publishments and rewards was the foundation of modern machine learning theory.

4. "In the process of trying to imitate an adult human mind we are bound to think a good deal about the process which has brought it to the state that it is in. We may notice three components.
(a) The initial state of the mind, say at birth,
(b) The education to which it has been subjected,
(c) Other experiecne, not to be described as education, to which it has been subjected."

Turing compared the initial state of the mind to the state of birth. This was heuristic to me. To a baby, his initial state maybe is the human genetic structure. They was hereditary material.



This was so nice a paper that I wanted to read it again.

The motivation of my reading of this paper was only my curiosity to artificial intelligence. I spent nearly a whole day on it. There were so many emergent tasks for me. I must finish them firstly, then continue my curiosity.