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Is there any reason the test was treated as a holy grail other than the "Turing" name brand? I can't see any theoretical justification for it.
The theoretical justification for it is something analogous to the idea of a Universal Turing Machine, though obviously not rigorous.
If we come up with any other test to determine "human-level intelligence", a test that can't be beaten by a "spiky" non-general intelligence that outperforms in unexpected areas (I'm old enough to remember when chess performance was a generally-accepted sign of intelligence!), then someone judging a Turing test can just use that other test. If it turns out that for some reason an AI really can't understand how to respond to a weird hypothetical about upside-down tortoises, then the judge can ask them about upside-down tortoises. If computers had sucked at chess, a judge could have asked the AI to play chess. Computers only start to beat a Turing test reliably when there's nothing a judge can come up with that they can't beat.
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This is the way I always understood it. Lacking the ability to detect any internal experience other than our own, the way we distinguish between 2 different things is by applying input to them and seeing if there's differences in output, e.g. we shine light on it and detect what qualia the light that reflects off of it and into our eyeballs generate in our minds. Detecting intelligence isn't as simple as detecting the color or shape of something and wouldn't involve inputting light rays but rather words to see what words get returned in response. If there's no way to distinguish between 2 different entities in this way, then it makes no sense to say that 1 has human-level intelligence while the other lacks it. For that to be the case, there must be some way to induce different outputs from those 2 things with the same input. In something relating to intelligence, anyway; input-output of words probably don't cover the entirety of all possible detection mechanisms, but they do seem to me to cover a lot.
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Because it was an impossibly high bar. Nothing was able to do that, for years. The idea that you’d be able to talk to a computer program and not recognize it seemed like science fiction.
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Very intuitive, sensible, and wasn’t surpassed for 80 years.
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