Turing's Wager Explained

Turing's Wager should not be confused with the Turing Test.

Turing's Wager is a philosophical argument that claims it is impossible to infer or deduce a detailed mathematical model of the human brain within a reasonable timescale, and thus impossible in any practical sense. The argument was first given in 1950 by the computational theorist Alan Turing in his paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence, published in Mind . The argument asserts that determining any mathematical model of a computer (its source code or any isomorphic equivalent such as a Turing machine or virtual simulation) is not possible in a reasonable timeframe.^[1] As a consequence, determining a mathematical model of the human brain (which is, by its nature, more complicated) must also be impossible within that timeframe.

Effect of modern technology on the wager

It has been argued that modern neuroimaging techniques will allow researchers to create accurate simulations of the human mind within the 21st century (;,), thereby overcoming the wager.^[2] Others have argued that such claims are unjustified .

Relationship between Turing's Wager and the Turing Test

The Turing Test attempts to define when a machine might be said to possess human intelligence, while Turing's Wager is an argument aiming to demonstrate that characterising the brain mathematically will take over a thousand years. While building an artificial intelligence and mapping the human brain are both difficult endeavours, the former is actually a sub-problem of the latter .

References

• News: Fildes. Jonathan. 2009. Artificial brain '10 years away'. BBC News Online. London . 17 June 2017. "Henry Markram, director of the Blue Brain Project [...] told the TED Global conference in Oxford that [...] 'It is not impossible to build a human brain and we can do it in 10 years.'".
• Book: Kurzweil , Ray . 2012. How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed. New York. Viking Books. 978-0-670-02529-9.
• Book: Kurzweil . Ray. Kapor . Mitchell. Epstein. Robert. Roberts. Gary. Beber. Grace. Parsing the Turing Test: Philosophical and Methodological Issues in the Quest for the Thinking Computer. Springer Netherlands . Dordrecht. 2009. 463–477. Chapter 27: A Wager on the Turing Test. 978-1-4020-6710-5. 10.1007/978-1-4020-6710-5_27.
• Markram. Henry. 2012. The Human Brain Project. Scientific American. 306. 6. 50–55. 10.1038/scientificamerican0612-50. 22649994. 2012SciAm.306f..50M.
• Thwaites. Andrew. Soltan. Andrew. Wieser. Eric. Nimmo-Smith. Ian. 2017. The difficult legacy of Turing's wager. Journal of Computational Neuroscience. 43. 1. 1–4. 10.1007/s10827-017-0651-y. 28643213. 5502069.
• Turing. Alan. 1950. Computing machinery and intelligence. Mind. 59. 236. 433–460. 10.1093/mind/LIX.236.433.

Notes and References

1. Turing suggests 1000 years as a reasonable timeframe .
2. Turing's Wager should not be confused with 'A Wager on the Turing Test', a real-life wager between Kurzweil and Mitchell Kapor over whether a computer will pass the Turing Test by 2029 .