Subject: Vailidity of Turing Test Posted Nov 9, 2001 by Greyling		Post: 1

There's no way the Turing Test is 'universally accepted' as a test of whether a machine is sentient - there's a passionate debate on this wide-ranging subject covering decades of writing.

Turing's thesis is that the question as to whether a machine is sentient or not, can be replaced by the question of whether its conversation could be distinguished, under test conditions, from that of a human (who is assumed to be sentient), and hence the controversy: it is quite debatable whether a computer programmed to imitate 'genuine' responses can be said to be sentient only on that basis.

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