Earlier quoted context omitted.
The quotes you gave were certainly relevant, but still: Turing doesn't state in his paper that the interrogator is to be made aware (all I said). The rest is our modern interpretation of the test. It's a fine interpretation that I don't have a problem with, but it is an interpretation, not a criteria lifted from the paper. In the article Kurzweil even says as much: Turing was carefully imprecise in setting the rules…
In Turing's paper he suggests a game with a man and a woman and a human interogator. The human knows that there is one woman and one man and the interogator has to discover which is which. Turing then suggests using this game, but with a computer instead of a woman. It is a perverse interpretation of the paper to suggest that the human interrogator does not know that they are talking to one human and one computer. To…
The facts: Turing did not state in his paper that the human interrogator is to be made aware of the replacement.
The interpretations: Some more perverse than others :)
You don't need to mangle the meaning of normal every day English words, though philosophers like to. It's remarkable that modern Turing tests are not carried out exactly as described in the paper, yet people lay claim to their interpretations and versions as being better somehow.
See http://crl.ucsd.edu/~saygin/papers/saygin-jop.pdf for two views that support my point:
- For communication to be meaningful, communicators should act rational. Be relevant, avoid obscurity, needless repetition, social faux pas and ambiguity. Following Paul Grice's principles you get more normal and effective communication. This is significantly different from trying to trick a machine using obtuse, ambiguous, repetitious, weird communication. Remember: the original test was for player A and B to trick player C. Kurzweil's test is for player C to trick player A into revealing it is a bot.
- They created an entire chapter on bias (prior knowledge that the person was possibly talking to a machine). This shows that it is not a marginal view, but actually a view that makes a difference and has (philosophical) consequences. Subjects do not report thoughts that "this may be a computer", but they think: Person A is mentally ill or handicapped, on drugs, a child or very confused.
To conclude this discussion from my part: I think the modern Turing Tests as inspired by Loebner are fine. However they are not true to the paper in multiple ways, and they assume rules/criteria which Turing omitted. As for validity and philosophical importance of adding this criteria, the onus is on those that add it to prove its worth. If this is a pragmatic criteria to test machine intelligence, then just admit to it. Don't take the original paper and say that Turing omitted something, and that you should interpret and fill in the blanks in a certain way, else you are being perverse. As an aside: I muse about the inspiration for the test. I think it may have come from Turing playing 2-ply chess on a computer terminal. If unbeknownst to Turing a Grand Master would start relaying the moves mid-game, would Turing have noticed, and would Turing have noticed it in the near future? Though computers beat GM's nowadays, GM's still have correct suspicions when playing against an opponent using computer aid: The lines are too perfect, alien or far-fetched. It's interesting that even though artificial intelligence is already better at natural language processing and games of chess, it still does not suffice as human enough for some of us.