#Electric sheep robotics android#

WeвЂ™ve even begun talking about computers as though they have minds (e.g. The idea that a machine could pass as a human by fooling usВ leads naturally to the suspicionВ that machines are capable of thinking.

#Electric sheep robotics android#

DickвЂ™s science-fiction novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, sets up a moral dilemma in our struggles to distinguish android from person (the book was the basis for the famous film Blade Runner.) The Loebner Prize is awarded annually to the team which designs a chatbot that best passes (according to a panel of judges) a conventional Turing setup. The idea of this test has inspired all sorts of things in our culture. If he or she cannot reliably determine which is the computer, then that computer is said to have вЂњpassedвЂќ the test. The interrogator can do this only using written questions and responses. One human player, the вЂњinterrogator,вЂќ is isolated and asked to figure out which of the two other players is a computer and which is a human. Turing proposed his вЂњtestвЂќ - which he called the вЂњImitation GameвЂќ - to see if machines could behave in a way that is indistinguishable from a human being, specifically through a blind conversation.

This thought-experiment was devisedВ in a 1950 paper by Alan Turing, who is widely considered the father of computer science and artificial intelligence. I found some inspiration in the exhibit itself, which mentionsВ the captivating Turing test. As The Leonardo continues to host Alien Worlds & Androidswe thought we would highlight some of the minds behind robotics and artificial intelligence you might not have known about.