Showing remarkable insight into the relationship between language and thought, Alan Turing in 1950 proposed the Imitation Game as a proxy for the question “Can machines think?” and its meaning and practicality have been debated hotly ever since. The Imitation Game has come under criticism within the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence communities with leading scientists proposing alternatives, revisions, or even that the Game be abandoned entirely. Yet Turing’s imagined conversational fragments between human and machine are rich with complex instances of inference of implied information, reasoning from generalizations, and meta-reasoning, challenges AI practitioners have wrestled with since at least 1980 and continue to study. We argue that the very fact the Imitation Game is so difficult may be the very reason it shouldn’t be changed or abandoned. The semi-decidability of the game at this point hints at the possibility of a hard limit to the powers of technology.

中文翻译：

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模仿游戏：门槛还是分水岭？

1950 年，艾伦·图灵 (Alan Turing) 展示了对语言与思想之间关系的非凡洞察力，提出了模仿游戏作为“机器能思考吗？”问题的代理。其意义和实用性自此引发热议。模仿游戏在计算机科学和人工智能社区受到批评，领先的科学家提出了替代方案、修改方案，甚至完全放弃了该游戏。然而，图灵想象中的人机对话片段充满了隐含信息推理、概括推理和元推理的复杂实例，人工智能从业者至少自 1980 年以来就一直在努力应对并继续研究这些挑战。我们认为，模仿游戏如此困难的事实可能正是它不应该被改变或放弃的原因。游戏在这一点上的半可决定性暗示了对技术力量的硬限制的可能性。