ABSTRACT
Within a very short period during 1956-1957, two important projects concerned with the nature of human intelligence sprang up at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology: the work of Noam Chomsky in linguistics, and the project called Artificial Intelligence. The Turing Test and the Golem are both examples, with minor variations, of reverse-engineering projects. But the strikingly significant point is that both the Artificial Intelligence embodied in the Turing Test computer's software, and the Golem that the modern linguist is trying to achieve, are brother monsters: mechanized processes that infallibly distinguish between the meaningful and the meaningless. Since humans disagree among themselves on many points of grammar and usage, there will frequently be some disagreement between the Golem's judgements and those of at least some humans. Chomsky does claim that the Golem would be the image of the human mind in its linguistic aspect, even perhaps a map of the very brain paths involved in human understanding of language.
