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not known how, because in 1950 he published a paper to challenge on her ideas. This

was her position that computers could never surprise their human creators. Although
Babbage’s engines were sometimes described as “thinking machines” (by Ada’s
mother for one), they couldn’t think for themselves. In her notes to Menabrea’s
paper, Ada had written, “It is desirable to guard against the possibility of exaggerated
ideas that might arise as to the powers of the Analytical Engine. The Analytical Engine
has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how
to order it to perform. It can follow analysis, but it has no power of anticipating any
analytical relations or truths.” In other words, computers don’t think. People have

inner lives; computers don’t.

In 1950 Turing challenged this. He suggested that modern computers would one day
surprise us because of their enormous speed and storage capacity. This would enable
them to become capable of original thought. He devised a test for this, in which a
computer answers questions put to it by a human, who must then decide from the
answers if it’s a computer they are talking to, or a human: “A computer can be said to

possess artificial intelligence if it can mimic human responses under specific
conditions. The test is repeated many times. If the questioner makes the correct
determination in half of the test runs or less, the computer is considered to have
artificial intelligence because the questioner regards it as ‘just as human’ as the
human respondent.” In other words, if a computer can convince us it’s thinking, it
probably is.

The “Turing Test” has become iconic in computer history. But Selmer Bringsjord, an

American professor of cognitive and computer science, criticized it: “Turing’s claim
that ‘computers do take us by surprise’ is only true when ‘surprise’ is given a very
superficial interpretation. For, while it is true that computers do things that we don’t
intend them to do - because we’re not smart enough, or because we’re not careful
enough, or because there are rare hardware errors, or whatever - it isn’t true that
there are any cases in which we should want to say that a computer has originated

something.”

Bringsjord continued, “Ada Lovelace had a deep, accurate understanding of what
computation is. I care about what she thought was a big, missing, and perhaps
eternally missing, piece in a computing machine, that it could not be creative.”

He named his more rigorous approach, his rival to the Turing Test, “the Lovelace
Test”.