Searle compared a computer undergoing a Turing Test to an English-speaking man in a room who doesn't understand Chinese but has a manual for converting Chinese questions or commands into appropriate Chinese responses. The philosopher John Searle presented a famous challenge to the Turing test, called the Chinese room experiment, in 1980. Proponents of 'strong AI' argue that such a computer isn't just mindlessly, mechanically, cranking out answers it possesses subjective awareness, just as we do. (Today, of course, voice-recognition technology has become good enough for questions to be submitted orally.) If the interrogator can't tell which answers come from the human and which from the computer, then the computer must be thinking. The interrogator types out questions that are transmitted to the competitors. In one room is a human 'interrogator,' and in other rooms are two 'competitors,' one a human and the other a computer.

In a 1950 article, ' Computing Machinery and Intelligence,' Turing proposed a simple empirical method-which he called 'the imitation game' but is now called 'the Turing test'-for resolving the question. In his era, scientists and philosophers-as well as sci-fi writers-were already pondering whether computers were just calculating devices, like complicated abacuses, or can 'think' more or less as we humans do. I want to focus not on Turing's tragic demise but on one of his enduring contributions to philosophy. In 1954 Turing killed himself by ingesting cyanide. British authorities rewarded Turing by arresting him for homosexuality in 1952 and forcing him to undergo 'chemical castration,' which involved injections of estrogen. During World War II, he helped crack the German Enigma code, a vitally important achievement for the Allied war effort. The British mathematician Turing, born exactly a century ago, laid down the theoretical foundations of computer science and helped design one of the first computers, the Automatic Computing Engine, or ACE. Chillin' with my children in London recently, I kept a lookout for blog topics, and I found one: ' Codebreaker: Alan Turing's Life and Legacy,' an exhibit at the city's Science Museum.

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