ABSTRACT
Turing’s 1950 paper is often considered a complex and multilayered text, and key questions about it remain largely unanswered. Why did Turing argue for learning from experience as the best approach to achieving machine intelligence? Why did he spend several years working with chess playing as a task to illustrate and test for machine intelligence, only to trade it out for conversation in 1950? Why did he refer to gender imitation in a test for machine intelligence? This chapter addresses these questions by noting a historical fact that has received little attention in the secondary literature, namely that Turing proposed his test in the context of a specific controversy over the cognitive capabilities of digital computers, most notably with physicist and computer pioneer Douglas Hartree, chemist and philosopher Michael Polanyi, and neurosurgeon Geoffrey Jefferson. Seen in its context, Turing’s 1950 paper can be understood as a response to challenges posed to him by them. Turing did propose gender learning and imitation as one of his various imitation tests for machine intelligence, and this chapter argues that this was an important element in responding to Jefferson's suggestion that gendered behavior is causally related to the physiology of sex hormones.
