Can machines think?

Can machines think?

The question whether a machine can think, understand, reason and learn, is not so simple. It purely depends on how we define the term “thinking”.

This category is about whether or not computers, robots, and software agents can literally be said to think.  Humans think, chimps think, dogs think, cats and birds think. But do computers?  Is your computer thinking now?  Perhaps only specially programmed computers think?  Or perhaps only computers with special hardware can think -- hardware that resembles the neurons of the brain, for example. If computers can be made to think, then does that mean that humans are a kind of robot and their brains a kind of computer -- a neurocomputer, say?  One of the deeper issues here is that the term "thinking" is ambiguous in at least two ways: It can include being conscious of one's environment (surroundings), one's personal feelings and thoughts, etc., or it can mean cogitate, learn, plan, and solve problems, where these latter terms pick out mental events that may or may not be conscious. According to the second definition of thinking, yes machines can think. But if we consider the first one as machine can have feelings and thoughts then surely no, machines can’t think like humans. It all depends on the context in which we are talking about thinking.

Artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence

Before describing the term AI let us discuss intelligence first.

What is intelligence?

Intelligence is the capacity of body to understand.

Intelligence is the ability understanding, reasoning and learning.

Intelligence is an umbrella term which defines the abilities of brain of body such as thoughts, reasoning, understanding, leaning from past experience and problem solving.

What is Artificial Intelligence?

The modern definition of artificial intelligence (or AI) is "the study and design of intelligent agents" where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions which maximizes its chances of success.

John McCarthy, who coined the term in 1956, defines it as "the science and engineering of making intelligent machines."

Other names for the field have been proposed, such as computational intelligence, synthetic intelligence or computational rationality.

The term artificial intelligence is also used to describe a property of machines or programs: the intelligence that the system demonstrates.

AI research uses tools and insights from many fields, including computer science, psychology, philosophy, neuroscience, cognitive science, linguistics, operations research, economics, control theory, probability, optimization and logic.

AI attempts to understand how human thinks and use this understanding to build intelligent entities. 

The Turing Test approach, Artificial Intelligence

The Turing Test, proposed by Alan Turing TURING TEST (1950), was designed to provide a satisfactory operational definition of intelligence. A computer passes the test if a human interrogator, after posing some written questions, cannot tell whether the written responses come from a person or from a computer. For now, we note that programming a computer to pass a rigorously applied test provides plenty to work on. The computer would need to possess the following capabilities:

• natural language processing to enable it to communicate successfully in English;

• knowledge representation to store what it knows or hears;

• automated reasoning to use the stored information to answer questions and to draw new conclusions;

• machine learning to adapt to new circumstances and to detect and extrapolate patterns.

Turing’s test deliberately avoided direct physical interaction between the interrogator and the

computer, because physical simulation of a person is unnecessary for intelligence. However,

the so-called total Turing TOTAL TURING TEST Test includes a video signal so that the interrogator can test the subject’s perceptual abilities, as well as the opportunity for the interrogator to pass physical objects “through the hatch.” To pass the total Turing Test, the computer will need

• computer vision to perceive objects, and

• robotics to manipulate objects and move about.

These six disciplines compose most of AI, and Turing deserves credit for designing a test

that remains relevant 60 years later. Yet AI researchers have devoted little effort to passing

the Turing Test, believing that it is more important to study the underlying principles of intelligence than to duplicate an exemplar. The quest for “artificial flight” succeeded when the Wright brothers and others stopped imitating birds and started using wind tunnels and learning about aerodynamics. Aeronautical engineering texts do not define the goal of their field as making “machines that fly so exactly like pigeons that they can fool even other pigeons.”