Comment Re:Test vs Machine (Score 1) 337
The Turing Test is a proposed metric for telling whether a machine is emulating human behavior enough to be considered intelligent. It requires an interrogator to question two entities, one of which is human, the other a machine (typically via text to remove speech synthesis cues). If they cannot reliably determine which is which, the machine is said to pass.
A Universal Turing Machine is a theoretical computing device that implements a set of operations necessary for general purpose computing. There are infinite implementations (including the CPU in your box) but all UTMs are theoretically equivalent in terms of the tasks they can perform, although the complexity of any particular task is dependent on the definition of the particular UTM in question. Its behavior provides insight into the theoretical limits of what's possible with a sequential digital computer (ex - using a TM as an abstraction, it can be shown that for an arbitrary program it's impossible to determine algorithmically whether that program will halt).
A Universal Turing Machine is a theoretical computing device that implements a set of operations necessary for general purpose computing. There are infinite implementations (including the CPU in your box) but all UTMs are theoretically equivalent in terms of the tasks they can perform, although the complexity of any particular task is dependent on the definition of the particular UTM in question. Its behavior provides insight into the theoretical limits of what's possible with a sequential digital computer (ex - using a TM as an abstraction, it can be shown that for an arbitrary program it's impossible to determine algorithmically whether that program will halt).
