Will computers ever think? This question has had many people wondering for years. Everybody wants to know if computers can have intelligent conversations and think for themselves.
Alan Turing devised a test to let people begin to consider the fact that computers have a mind of their own. This would later be called the Turing test. The test is, "what is called the Imitation Game (IG). The game is played with a man (A), a woman (B), and an interrogator (C) whose gender is unimportant. The interrogator stays in a room apart from A and B. The objective of the interrogator is to determine which of the other two is the woman while the objective of both the man and the woman is to convince the interrogator that he/she is the woman and the other is not What will happen when a machine takes the part of A in this game? Will the interrogator decide wrongly as often when the game is played like this as he does when the game is played between a man and a woman?" Basically, the man and the woman are going to ask questions and try and fool the computer. They are going to try and get the computer to think it is something or someone else so that it will get the questions wrong. If the computer gets it right then they have to wonder if computers can think. If the computer could replace the person in the conversation and give the right answers then maybe computers can think for themselves.
There are only a few people that believe computers think or will ever be able to think. Turing says, "The claim that a machine cannot be the subject of its own thought can of course only be answered if it can be shown that the machine has some thought with some subject matter. Nevertheless, "the subject matter of a machine's operations" does seem to mean something, at least to the people who deal with it. If, for instance, the machine was trying to find a solution of the equation x^2 - 40x - 11 = 0 one would be tempted to describe this equation as part of the machine's subject matter at that moment.
