The Imitation Game, Turing Test & IBM Watson

Originally Published on April 11, 2015
Science related films have made a comeback recently at Hollywood. We have seen black holes, wormholes, and Einstein's relativity theory in action in Interstellar; admired the remarkable life story of Stephen Hawking and his arrival at this big bang theory in Hawking. Playing at theaters nowadays is another engaging movie based on the real life story of legendary cryptanalyst Alan Turing. The film portrays the nail-biting race against time by Turing and his brilliant team of code-breakers at Britain's top-secret Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park, during the darkest days of World War II. 

Alan Turing also is a legendary computer scientist and is known for the "Turing Test". The Turing test is a test of a machine's ability to exhibit intelligent behavior equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human. The test was introduced by Alan Turing in his 1950 paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence," which opens with the words: "I propose to consider the question, 'Can machines think?'" Because "thinking" is difficult to define, Turing chooses to "replace the question by another, which is closely related to it and is expressed in relatively unambiguous words. Turing's new question is: "Are there imaginable digital computers which would do well in the imitation game?" This question, Turing believed, is one that can actually be answered. In the remainder of the paper, he argued against all the major objections to the proposition that "machines can think". In the years since 1950, the test has proven to be both highly influential and widely criticised, and it is an essential concept in the philosophy of artificial intelligence.His test has come to be referred to with Turing's name.

Having always been interested in artificial intelligence (AI), I vividly remember ex IBM CEO Sam Palmisano’s mission for the IBM researchers: Build a smart computer system that can understand natural language, interpret, learn and answer to questions asked in any format. And test the success of this system by making it compete against biggest champions of Jeopardy. This was before the times "Cognitive Computing" was mainstream buzzword. 

This system is now built. Watching IBM Watson beat the human competitors on Jeopardy was a thrill and I remember thinking to my self: Can a computer finally pass the Turing test? We might be quite close. Analytics have come a long way since the enigma-cracking days of Alan Turing. Combining smart analytics with the exploding computing power and new technologies such as massively parallel processing, big data analytics, unstructured data processing have brought us the smart and learning machine IBM Watson. 

IBM Watson is now busy in many fields such as helping find solutions for cancer patients, advising pharmaceutical scientist on developing new drugs, creating never before thought about delicious food recipes. Actually, IBM Watson can even start helping NASA build intelligent robots as in the the movie Interstellar; NASA, IBM Team For Worldwide Space App Hackathon


IBM Watson on Wikipedia