1. Dynamic aspects of the Turing Test

What is unclear from Turing's 1950 paper, is the length of time that was to be given to the test. It is clearly easier to fool people if you only have to interact with them in a single period of interaction. For example it might be possible to trick someone into thinking one was an expert on chess if one only met them once at a party, but far harder to maintain the pretence if one has to interact with the same person day after day. It is something in the longer-term development of the interaction between people that indicates their mental capabilities in a more reliable way than a single period of interaction. The deeper testing of that abilities comes from the development of the interaction resulting from the new questions that arise from testing the previous responses against ones interaction with the rest of the world. The longer the period of interaction lasts and the greater the variety of contexts it can be judged against, the harder the test. To continue the party analogy, having talked about chess, one's attention might well be triggered by a chess article in next day's newspaper which, in turn, might lead to more questioning of one's acquantance.

The ability of entities to participate in a cognitive `arms-race', where two or more entities try to `out-think' each other seems to be an important part of intelligence. If we set a trap for a certain animal in exactly the same place and in the same manner day after day and that animal keeps getting trapped in it, then this can be taken as evidence of a lack of intelligence. On the other hand if one has to keep innovating one's trap and trapping techniques in order to catch the animal, then one would usually attribute to it some intelligence (e.g. a low cunning).

For the above reasons I will adopt a reading of the Turing Test, such that a candidate must pass muster over a reasonable period of time, punctuated by interaction with the rest of the world. To make this interpretation clear I will call this the "long-term Turing Test" (LTTT). The reason for doing this is merely to emphasise the interactive and developmental social aspects that are present in the test. I am emphasising the fact that the TT, as presented in Turing's paper is not merely a task that is widely accepted as requiring intelligence, so that a successful performance by an entity can cut short philosophical debate as to its adequacy. Rather that it requires the candidate entity to participate in the reflective and developmental aspects of human social intelligence, so that an imputation of its intelligence mirrors our imputation of each other's intelligence.

That the LTTT is a very difficult task to pass is obvious (we might ourselves fail it during periods of illness or distraction), but the source of its difficulty is not so obvious. In addition to the difficulty of implementing problem-solving, inductive, deductive and linguistic abilities, one also has to impart to a candidate a lot of background and contextual information about being human including: a credible past history, social conventions, a believable culture and even commonality in the architecture of the self. A lot of this information is not deducible from general principles but is specific to our species and our societies.