Overheard In Providence

Next time you’re wandering through the hallways of your local computer science department, just, you know, soaking in the atmosphere, you’ll no doubt feel compelled to read the various nerdy comics that students, professor and administrators have chosen to cut out and paste on their office doors (hopefully you like Dilbert). As a CS grad students, this is the highest honor I can bestow on a comic strip (particularly a web comic strip which doesn’t naturally exist in printed form). Today, for the first time, I am bestowing this honor on the recent XKCD strip shown below.

Since this is a pretty big day for both me and XKCD, I though I should spend a few paragraphs explaining (to the non-CS types out there) exactly why this comic is so goddamn hilarious.

The Turing test was originally proposed in 1950 by pioneering logician and computer scientist Alan Turing. About 20 years earlier, Turing described a simple machine, now called a Turing machine, that could perform only a few simple operations. He then showed how the machine could be programmed to carry out arbitrarily complex computations. In doing so, he provided the theoretical basis for modern day computers.

By the 1950’s, actual computers were being built, and folks realized that a sufficeintly large computer, when properly programmed, could appear intelligent. People wondered if computers could one day “think” like people, but in many ways this question was vague. To clear things up, Turing proposed a hypothetical test of a computer’s intelligence. During a Turing test, a computer is allowed to communicate with a person through writing. If, after a long conversation, this human cannot accurately distinguish the computer from another person, the computer is deemed as intelligent as a person. As you know, today’s computers cannot yet past the Turing test.

So there you go, you’re finally ready to laugh. The Turing test is a way for a machine to prove that it’s truly intelligent. To do this, the machine must convince an examiner that they are talking to another person. If you were to take the test (in place of the machine), you’d no doubt pass, but it’d take some sort of Hannibal Lecter-type supergenius to convince another person that they were a computer. The comic’s suggestion that a machine could pull this off is delightfully absurd, plus a perfect set up is provided by referencing “extra credit” on a pass/fail test for computer intelligence. Finally there’s the illustration itself, a hilarious vignette in which the anonymous gray computer terminal has forced a now deeply-confused examiner to question the very essence of his being. It all fits together beautifully! I can’t wait to stand outside my office and look at it.