Can a Machine Think?
In this article, Alan Turing, who first came up with the ideas of artificial intelligence and thinking machines, and Cahit Arf, who talked about these machines for the first time in Turkey’s history, analyze thinking machines.
The question of whether machines can think or not, although it has been implicitly expressed in the historical process, was first explicitly addressed by Alan M. Turing in 1950. Raising the question at a public conference in 1958, Arf comes up with machine design examples that we can be convinced that he can think of, as well as making determinations about the possibility of machines having certain features that can be considered as an indicator of what a person thinks. According to him, machines; It can be designed with mental abilities to perform logical and analytical operations with thinking styles based on using language, calculating, making analogies, and eliminating, and there are similarities between the way the human brain works and the way machines work. However, Arf sees the main difference between humans and machines in the difficulty of bringing the aesthetic consciousness of humans to machines.
Alan M. Turing proposes in his paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence to consider the question “Can machines think?”. In his approach, he replaces the question with another which is “expressed in relatively unambiguous words” to avoid the vagueness of the ordinary concepts of “machine” and “think”. He attempts to describe the new form of the problem in terms of a game (“imitation game”). Nowadays, the game is known as the Turing test.
According to Turing, the original question “Can machine think?” can be replaced by a question, which is similar to the following: Is the interrogator able to distinguish between the machine and the person? In explicit terms, the criterion determining that a machine can think is the interrogator’s inability to tell the difference.
Arf presented the concrete indicator of thought as different reactions to different effects and emphasized that people react with different words to different words spoken to them or to different effects they are exposed to and that these reactions should be taken as proof of their thinking. Thus, Arf establishes a link between thought and behavior by referring to the effect and reaction relationship and deals with this link depending on the language phenomenon.
The first thing to note is that Arf does not touch upon the subject of “learning” for thinking machines. According to Turing, on the other hand, the main point is what he calls learning, and according to Turing, it is necessary to turn to this learning business for thinking machines to be possible. One similar way of thinking, both Turing and Arf, draws attention to and emphasizes the importance of machine memories.
Another similar inquiry is to point out that machines are designed to solve a specific problem. While Arf explains this subject by making an analogy between the human brain and the machine; Turing analyzes this issue in the context of Lovelace’s thesis and does not accept Lovelace’s idea, rejecting it with the seed/plant analogy.
By looking at the correspondence between the machine that does not see each other and the human, what Turing means by thinking machine emphasizes that if the human cannot understand that the other person is a machine, that machine will be a thinking machine, Arf does not put forward such a condition. Since it is the uncertainty principle, it says that it is possible if these subatomic parts direct machines that think like this.
Finally, Turing has full faith in thinking machines and has full hope that these machines will emerge by the end of his century. Arf, on the other hand, stands at a more pessimistic point and thinks that it may never be done for many years.
References
- Turing, Alan M. (1950). Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Mind, 59/433–460.
- Arf, C. (1959).Makine Düşünebilir Mi ve Nasıl Düşünebilir?, Atatürk Üniversitesi - Üniversite Çalışmalarını Muhite Yayma ve Halk Eğitimi Yayınları Konferanslar Serisi No: 1, Erzurum, s. 91–103
- Sarı, F. (2021). Cahit Arf’in “Makine Düşünebilir mi ve Nasıl Düşünebilir?” Adlı Makalesi Üzerine Bir Çalışma . TRT Akademi , 6 (13) , 812–833.
