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
Characteristic class Characteristic class In mathematics, a characteristic class is a way of associating to each principal bundle "X" a cohomology class of "X". The cohomology class measures the extent the bundle is "twisted" — and whether it possesses sections. Characteristic classes are global invariants that measure the deviation of a local product structure from a global product structure. They are one of the unifying geometric concepts in algebraic topology, differential geometry, and algebraic geometry. The notion of characteristic class arose in 1935 in the work of Eduard Stiefel and Hassler Whitney about vector fields on manifolds. Let "G" be a topological