Reading Response Exemplar

CSC 105 - The Digital Age - Professor Jerod Weinman

CACM Editor-in-Chief Moshe Varde wrote the following editorial for the magazine.

Varde, M. Y. (2014, September). Would Turing Have Passed the Turing Test? Communications of the ACM, 57(9), 5. http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2643596

A reader wrote the following letter in response:¹

Contrary to what the first sentence of Alan Turing's 1950 paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence might suggest, the paper was not about the question Can machines think? Turing quickly rejected that question because its meaning is undefined, replacing it with a vaguely related alternative that is relatively unambiguous. He said he considered Can machines think? too meaningless to deserve discussion and did not claim his replacement question was, in any sense, equivalent to the original question.
Nobody interested in the so-called Turing Test should neglect the work of the late MIT professor Joseph Weizenbaum in the mid-1960s. Using a computer that was extremely limited in computing power by today's standards, he created a simple program called Eliza that could carry out an apparently interesting conversation with a user. Nobody who examined Eliza's code would consider the program to be intelligent. It clearly had no information about the topic being discussed. Over the years I have met at least several people who viewed Eliza as a serious attempt to pass the so-called Turing test; some actually worked to improve it. Weizenbaum found this surprising and insisted they were wrong. He had written the program and related paper to show that passing the Turing test was trivial and that the test should not be used as a measure of intelligence.
Moshe Y. Vardi was correct in his Editor's Letter Would Turing Have Passed the Turing Test? (Sept. 2014) when he suggested that Turing's imitation game should be regarded as nothing more than a game. I would go further. Computer scientists have wasted far too much time and resources trying to answer big but vague philosophical questions (such as Can a machine be intelligent?). Their effort would be better spent on answering little questions about specific issues (such as Can a computing machine be trusted to park a car?). Discussion of such practical matters would be far more useful than endless debates about the Turing test and who or what might pass it.

David Lorge Parnas, Ottawa, Canada

CACM Staff. (2014, December). On the significance of Turing's test. Communications of the ACM, 57(12), 8-9. http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2684441

As is often the nature of letters to the editor, this response only addresses a single article. However, considering the rubric for reading responses, in 330 words, the letter uses a variety of active verbs (e.g., suggest, rejected, replacing, claim, neglect, created, examined, consider). It also incorporates one concrete additional reference (Weizenbaum). Moreover, it uses personal experience ("I have met at least several people") to advance a substantitive argument ("computer scientists have wasted far too much time") in a way that is gripping ("Eliza . . . could carry out an apparently interesting conversation with a user"), creative ("Can a computing machine be trusted to park a car?"), eloquent ("nothing more than a game"), and convincing ("I would go further").

Footnotes:

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