James Drogan

This is a repost of an original from March 17, 2005, on a site of mine that no longer exists.

Alan Turing's 1950 paper in Mind, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, proposed a test in which a human being and a computer would be interrogated under conditions where the interrogator would not know which was which, the communication being entirely by textual messages. Turing argued that if the interrogator could not distinguish them by questioning, then it would be unreasonable not to call the computer intelligent.

In The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence Ray Kurzweil predicts that by the year 2029 "Machines claim to be conscious. These claims are largely accepted."

I propose The Cloud Test. Can Kurzweil's machine find shapes in clouds?