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 one instruction set computer) and the ability to change an arbitrary amount of memory ("e.g.", the ability to maintain an arbitrary number of data items). Of course, no physical system can have infinite memory; but if the limitation of finite memory is ignored, most programming languages are otherwise Turing complete. In colloquial usage, the terms "Turing complete" or "Turing equivalent" are used to mean that any real-world general-purpose computer or computer language can approximately simulate the computational aspects of any other real-world general-purpose computer or computer language. Real computers constructed so far can be functionally analyzed like a single-tape Turing