Are You Smarter Than Your Toaster?

Have you ever wondered if your toaster or microwave is intelligent? Probably not. What about your computer? Does that machine that is capable of doing so much at once within a blink of the eye possibly possess something that can be determined to be in close proximity to actual sentient intelligence? Here's a little test to see for yourself.

You sit at your computer typing in questions. Your computer is connected to two other computers. There is another person sitting at the second computer who is answering your questions by typing them so they display on the monitor. The third computer, however, has no operator, but has been programmed to respond to the questions you are posing from the first computer. What can you find out from this test? Plenty.

If you are handed the answers to your questions (without knowing beforehand whether they came from computer 2 or 3) and you CANNOT tell the difference between the answers provided by a human being and a computer, then you have just arrived at one technological definition of artificial intelligence. Of course, there is a caveat involved, and that is that you also cannot define any limitations upon what intelligence actually means. This test, known as the Turing Test, provides only a very limited and quite prosaic definition of artificial intelligence. What has really been determined here is the capacity for a human being to confuse demonstrating intelligence with actually being intelligent.