The following is an extract from the typewritten script of a BBC radio broadcast
entitled ‘Can Automatic Calculating Machines Be Said To Think’, recorded in
January 1952. In response to the introductory remarks
We’re here today to discuss whether calculating machines can be said to think
in any proper sense of the word. … Turing, … [h]ave you a mechanical defini-
tion?,
Turing replies:
I don’t want to give a definition of thinking, but if I had to I should probably be
unable to say anything more about it than that it was a sort of buzzing that went
on inside my head. But I don’t really see that we need to agree on a definition
at all. The important thing is to try to draw a line between the properties of a
brain, or of a man, that we want to discuss, and those that we don’t. To take an
extreme case, we are not interested in the fact that the brain has the consistency
of cold porridge. We don’t want to say ‘This machine’s quite hard, so it isn’t
a brain, and so it can’t think.’ I would like to suggest a particular kind of
test that one might apply to a machine. You might call it a test to see whether the
machine thinks, but it would be better to avoid begging the question, and say
that the machines that pass are (let’s say) ‘Grade A’ machines.
[...]
Well, that’s my test. Of course I am not saying at present either that machines
really could pass the test, or that they couldn’t. My suggestion is just that this
is the question we should discuss. It’s not the same as ‘Do machines think,’
but it seems near enough for our present purpose, and raises much the same
difficulties.
Well, there’s this:
http://swarma.org/thesis/doc/jake_224.pdf