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Strong AI and the Frame Problem
In 1950, the pioneering computer scientist Turing suggested that intelligence is a matter of behaviour or behavioural capacity; whether a system has a mind, or how intelligent it is, is determined by what it can and cannot do. Turing also proposed a pragmatic criterion of what a system can do that would be sufficient to show that it is intelligent. This test became known as the Turing Test. Turing (1950) proposed that a non-human system will be deemed intelligent if it acts so like an ordinary person in certain respects that other people cannot tell that it isn't one. Interestingly, Turing's idea was not simply about imitation; rather, he specified verbal behaviour. A system is surely intelligent, he said, if it can carry on an ordinary conversation like an ordinary person (via electronic means, to avoid any influence due to appearance, tone of voice etc). Strong AI states that the running of computational processes on a computer is sufficient to produce a system that behaves like an (intelligent) conscious being. This issue is hotly debated. Weak AI states that a computer system can imitate the behaviour of an intelligent machine but would not be actually conscious. This issue is not so keenly contested; most computer scientists, philosophers, and cognitive scientists would accept weak AI (even if they rejected strong AI) although the physicist Penrose is a notable exception (see section on Godel's theorem).
Some time after the Turing test was postulated Turing suggested that the imitation game may have stacked the odds too heavily against the machine. After all, he pointed out, if a human were to pretend to be a machine he would clearly make a very poor showing.
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