Hofstadter, Dennett - The Mind's I

A Coffeehouse Conversation 72would be safest if all three people were totally unknown to each other.PAT: Could you ask any questions at all, with no holds barred?SANDY: Absolutely. That’s the whole idea.PAT: Don’t you think then, that pretty quickly it would degenerate into very sex-orientedquestions? I can imagine the man, overeager to act convincing, giving the game away byanswering some very blunt questions that most women would find too personal toanswer, even through an anonymous computer connection.SANDY: It sounds plausible.CHRIS: Another possibility would be to probe for knowledge of minute aspects oftraditional sex-role differences, by asking about such things as dress seizes and so on.The psychology of the Imitation Game could get pretty subtle. I suppose it would make adifference if the interrogator were a woman or a man. Don’t you think that a womancould spot some telltale differences more quickly than a man could?PAT: If so, maybe that’s how to tell a man from a woman!SANDY: Hmm . . . that’s a new twist! In any case, I don’t know if this original version ofthe Imitation Game has ever been seriously tried out, despite the fact that it would berelatively easy to do with modern computer terminals. I have to admit, though, that I’mnot sure what it would prove, whichever way it turned out.PAT: I was wondering that. What would it prove if the interrogator -- say, a woman –couldn’t tell correctly which person was the woman? It certainly wouldn’t prove that theman was a woman.SANDY: Exactly! What I find funny is that although I fundamentally believe in theTuring test, I’m not sure what the point is of the Imitation Game, on which it’s founded.CHRIS: I’m not any happier with the Turing test for “thinking machines” than I am withthe Imitation Game as a test for femininity.PAT: From your statements I gather that the Turing test is a kind of extension of theImitation game, only involving a machine and a person in separate rooms.SANDY: That’s the idea. The machine tries its hardest to convince the interrogator that itis the human being, while the human tries to make it clear that he or she is not acomputer.72