Turing test The question of whether it is possible for machines to think has a long history, which is firmly entrenched in the distinction between dualist and materialist views of the mind. René Descartes prefigures aspects of the Turing test in his 1637 Discourse on the Method when he writes: Here Descartes notes that automata are capable of responding to human interactions but argues that such automata cannot respond appropriately to things said in their presence in the way that any human can. Descartes therefore prefigures the Turing test by defining the insufficiency of appropriate linguistic response as that which separates the
Turing completeness is that there exist problems for which it is impossible to predict what a (Turing-complete) system will do over an arbitrarily long time. The classic example is the halting problem: create an algorithm which takes as input (a) a program in some Turing-complete language, and (b) some data to be fed to "that" program; and which determines whether the program, operating on the input, will eventually stop or will continue forever. It is trivial to create an algorithm that can do this for "some" inputs, but impossible to do this in general. For any characteristic of the program's eventual output,