Animals, Zombanimals, and the Total Turing Test

Alan Turing devised his famous test (TT) through a slight modification of the parlor game in which a judge tries to ascertain the gender of two people who are only linguistically accessible. Stevan Harnad has introduced the Total TT, in which the judge can look at the contestants in an attempt to determine which is a robot and which a person. But what if we confront the judge with an animal, and a robot striving to pass for one, and then challenge him to peg which is which? Now we can index TTT to a particular animal and its synthetic correlate. We might therefore have TTTrat, TTTcat, TTTdog, and so on. These tests, as we explain herein, are a better barometer of artificial intelligence (AI) than Turing's original TT, because AI seems to have ammunition sufficient only to reach the level of artificial animal, not artificial person.

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2000
• Where: JOLLI
• Authors: Selmer Bringsjord, Clarke Caporale, Ron Noel
• Keywords: Alan Turing, Famous Test, JOLLI 2000, Slight Modification