Perhaps the most famous test of artificial intelligence is the Turing test, elaborated in 1950. As part of his argument Turing put forward the idea of an 'imitation game', in which a human being and a computer would be interrogated under conditions where the interrogator would not know which was which, the communication being entirely by textual messages. Turing argued that if the interrogator could not distinguish them by questioning, then it would be unreasonable not to call the computer intelligent.

There are several ways of interpreting and discussing the Turing test, which in effect all lead to the discussing of some key philosophical views on the mind. Considering the mind as an input-output device with the exterior world, the four main metaphysical takes on the mind would have four different views of how the decision of choosing an appropriate output to a given input is mediated. The dualistic view on the mind would see as responsible for this mediation the right conscious experiences, the mind-brain identity theory would name the right neurophysiological mechanisms, functionalism the right procedures while the behaviorist would not identify any. Accordingly, these four views would view the mental processes as phenomenological, neurophysiological, computational, while the behaviorist would see the mind as lacking any processes but just having qualities resulted from behavioral dispositions.

What these four views state effectively about the way the mind works can be explained in an easier way, as follows. The dualistic view implies a certain awareness of the self, of the past experiences and is probably the closest to imply a freedom of choice. The mind-brain identity sees the mind and the brain as a whole and as the only defining element of humans. All the processes of thinking can be explained through chemical and biological reactions. Functionalism is the closest to the Turing test and to the most basic way we perceive computers. It states that the mind acts as an axiomatic system and all the outputs are given as results of the use of the axioms and theorems present in the brain. Behaviorism sees every decision made by the mind as the choice of one alternative over another, where the preferred output is the response that has repeatedly been followed by a reinforcing stimulus.

We can see now that a method that would test the effectiveness of such a machine would be entirely based on a chosen interpretation of the mind. Moreover, not only the test should be based on this interpretation, but also the whole way the machine is built. It is obvious that the Turing test is entirely based on functionalism because the way computers were built, especially in the beginning was based on functionalism.

Nevertheless, the Turing test has been severely criticized, especially by logicians. There has even been invented a counter-test, or experiment to prove its lack of validity. This test, the Chinese Room Experiment, developed by John Searle has the main quality that assumes the premises of the Turing test, namely that the human mind works according to theory that it has built in. Shortly, the test says that an English native speaker that has no knowledge of Chinese, is locked in a room and given a set of instructions and then two batches of Chinese writings.

When the third one is given, he is able to correlate one set of formal symbols to another set of formal symbols and thus, using the rules, he is able to give back certain sorts of Chinese symbols with certain sorts of shapes in response to certain sorts of shapes given him in the third batch. Thus, the person would be able to communicate in Chinese, and convince the interviewer of his abilities, without actually knowing any word of Chinese. He produces the answers by manipulating uninterpreted formal symbols, but as far as the Chinese is concerned, he simply behaves like a computer; he performs computational operations on formally specified elements. For the purposes of Chinese, he is simply an instantiation of the computer program. Searle