Artificial Stupidity - History

History

Alan Turing, in his 1952 paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence, proposed a test for intelligence which has since become known as the Turing test. While there are a number of different versions, the original test, described by Turing as being based on the "Imitation Game", involved a "machine intelligence" (a computer running an AI program), a female participant, and an interrogator. Both the AI and the female participant were to claim that they were female, and the interrogator's task was to work out which was the female participant and which was not by examining the participant's responses to typed questions. While it is not clear whether or not Turing intended that the interrogator was to know that one of the participants was a computer, while discussing some of the possible objections to his argument Turing raised the concern that "machines cannot make mistakes".

It is claimed that the interrogator could distinguish the machine from the man simply by setting them a number of problems in arithmetic. The machine would be unmasked because of its deadly accuracy. —Turing, 1950, page 448

As Turing then noted, the reply to this is a simple one: the machine should not attempt to "give the right answers to the arithmetic errors". Instead, deliberate errors should be introduced to the computer's responses.