Turing test be answered. The Turing test, even if imperfect, at least provides something that can actually be measured. As such, it is a pragmatic attempt to answer a difficult philosophical question. The format of the test allows the interrogator to give the machine a wide variety of intellectual tasks. Turing wrote that "the question and answer method seems to be suitable for introducing almost any one of the fields of human endeavour that we wish to include." John Haugeland adds that "understanding the words is not enough; you have to understand the "topic" as well." To pass a well-designed Turing test,
Turing test could pass the Turing test simply by manipulating symbols of which they had no understanding. Without understanding, they could not be described as "thinking" in the same sense people do. Therefore, Searle concludes, the Turing test cannot prove that a machine can think. Much like the Turing test itself, Searle's argument has been both widely criticised and highly endorsed. Arguments such as Searle's and others working on the philosophy of mind sparked off a more intense debate about the nature of intelligence, the possibility of intelligent machines and the value of the Turing test that continued through the 1980s and