8 The System Mindset
Every year contestants assemble at Bletchley Park—where Alan Turing once worked to crack German codes in World War II—to outcompete computer programs in being human. The contest is based on the famous imitation game (now known as the Turing test) whereby a person has a message conversation over a computer with an unseen entity. The entity may be a computer program or a person. Each is trying to convince their counterpart that they are, in fact, human. If you are a person competing, effectively you are, as author Brian Christian put it, trying to be “the most human human.”1 Usually, a human wins, but many people have trouble convincing their counterparts that they are a person.
Horse races like this, where a person is ...
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