The Imitation Game

Can computers think? The answer will depend on whether you believe that submarines can swim or that airplanes can fly. Submarines do not wriggle through the water like fish and airplanes do not flap their wings and adjust feathers to soar in thermal updrafts. We don't say that submarines or tug boats swim, perhaps because we can ourselves swim. We don't extend the meaning of "swim" to include boats being driven by engines. We do extend the meaning of "fly" to include planes driven through the air, perhaps because we cannot fly ourselves and don't mind ignoring fine distinctions in such a case. Computers don't think in the sense that people think (or swim) but computers and airplanes do solve problems in a different way. We can say that computers think (by extending the meaning of "think"), or we can decide not to say computers think for the same reason that we don't say that submarines swim. It's a grammatical decision that Alan Turing addresses in THE IMITATION GAME, the best movie I saw in 2014. 

I've been reading about Turing for many decades, in part because of my interest in World War Two, which Turing, more than anyone else, helped win, in part because he was a student of Ludwig Wittgenstein, the deepest thinker of the 20th century, in part because Turing invented the computer and in part because Turing, not your typical guy, was eventually savaged by the nation he had saved. You can see how this might make a movie.
 
Wittgenstein, inventor of the term "language game," once wrote, in a thought experiment, that if you could manufacture a robot that looked and acted exactly like a human being, and there was no detectable difference between the robot and a person, the robot would be a person. The Turing test is a genuine experiment. Let's say that you are exchanging messages with someone in another room, someone who is a person or a computer. You can ask any questions you choose. If the answers you receive make human sense in every case, then you are communicating with a human or with a computer that imitates human responses perfectly. The computer thinks. That is the imitation game.