This gets brought up a lot, but it seems to me like a simple misreading.
Turing describes an initial game with a man (A) and a woman (B), where A's goal is to imitate B, and then asks: "what will happen if a machine takes the place of A?" I suppose it's possible that he meant the machine takes A's place by imitating a woman, but it's a lot more plausible that he meant the machine takes A's place by imitating B, i.e. a person.
Also there are several quotes later on that make no sense under your reading - check out the quotes including "imitation of the behaviour of a man" and "the part of B being taken by a man". Those quotes (maybe others, I didn't look) only make sense if the game is for the machine to imitate a person, not a woman.
I agree with your last paragraph (see my last paragraph). But I think the most natural reading of the initial task description is that the machine also pretends to be a woman. The line “we do not wish to penalize a machine for being unable to shine in beauty competitions” supports this interpretation, given that a beauty competition is an event for women, under the assumptions of the time. So I think there are conflicting cues in the paper as to the intended interpretation.
As you say in your other comment, though, I don’t think Turing thought the exact details of the game were important - which explains why he didn’t trouble to spell them out very exactly.
If I had to guess, I’d say that Turing assumes that as the machine has no gender, the only relevant difference between the machine and the woman is that one is human and one is not. So for the rest of the paper he focuses on that difference and is vague on the gendered aspect of the task.
Um. I follow you but that's a pretty huge stretch, considering that nothing in the paper is inconsistent with the conventional reading (that the machine is to imitate a person). There are sentences that are consistent with other readings, but none that's inconsistent with the usual one.
The machine is imitating a person on both understandings of the task. The difference lies in C’s task (whether C is trying to find which of A and B is a woman and which is a man, or trying to find which is human and which is a machine).
I think the initial description of the task is genuinely ambiguous. Your interpretation of it hadn’t occurred to me before, but I do see it now. I still think that “…when a machine takes the part of A in this game…” is most naturally interpreted as leaving the task unaltered but for the man being replaced by a machine, rather than implicitly describing the task mutadis mutandis. But reasonable people can certainly differ on such questions of interpretation.
Honestly I think Turing’s whole framing of the task is unnecessarily elaborate and confusing. Why even bother describing the man/woman task to begin with? I am not sure. Popular descriptions of the ‘Turing Test’ don’t seem to find this framing of any expositionary value.
I think the point of the man/woman version of the game is that it lets Turing propose his question in relative terms. He doesn't ask "can the machine fool somebody N% of the time?" (as several in this thread imagine), but rather "can the machine fool somebody as often as one person fools another under similar conditions?".
> Your interpretation of it hadn’t occurred to me before,
The idea of a Turing Test is pretty widely understood to mean a test where a person guesses which responses come from a machine, not where they guess someone's gender. So my interpretation here is just that the paper says what most people think it says.
Sorry, I am being ambiguous myself. I meant that your interpretation of this specific sentence had not occurred to me:
> We now ask the question, "What will happen when a machine takes the part of A in this game?"
I think you are right about what Turing meant. But it had honestly never occurred to me before that this description of the game could be understood as a description of the standard 'Turing test'. So, for this reason, I had always been sympathetic to the point that the standard Turing test does not appear to be the test that Turing describes in the original paper.
Thanks for the paper! I wasn't aware of it but it's very much what I wanted to say. The bit about Turing's other test involving chess was particularly interesting.
Turing describes an initial game with a man (A) and a woman (B), where A's goal is to imitate B, and then asks: "what will happen if a machine takes the place of A?" I suppose it's possible that he meant the machine takes A's place by imitating a woman, but it's a lot more plausible that he meant the machine takes A's place by imitating B, i.e. a person.
Also there are several quotes later on that make no sense under your reading - check out the quotes including "imitation of the behaviour of a man" and "the part of B being taken by a man". Those quotes (maybe others, I didn't look) only make sense if the game is for the machine to imitate a person, not a woman.