Im currently doing a Hollywood consulting gig for the production of an upcomming science fiction movie.<p>One interesting question came up today: Could a human manage to pass a turing test in a foreign language?<p>Imagine you would have to convince somebody that you are human. And the test is done in chinese. Could you?<p>What if the alphabet was binary? What would your answer to "1" be? How many digits would you need to prove you are human?
If the human knows the foreign language, then sure. If not, then I'm not certain you would get any results that make enough sense to deem it a pass or a failure. (And the computer almost certainly would not be programmed to respond to unexpected language input either.)<p>"1" by itself isn't a question. Neither a human nor a computer could usefully answer "1" without being told the context in some way. A human might tell you this over the Turing test teletype, but so might a computer! If the question is stupid or senseless, I don't think you're going to get useful results.<p>One possible twist with "1" could be some sort of pattern recognition, which could arguably be evidence in favor of intelligence, but I don't think that was really the intent of the Turing test.<p>In any case, if you as the interrogator violate the expectations of the Turing test, you could very likely brute-force your way into determining which candidate was human and which was a computer, but I think that violates the spirit of the test.