s," that rely upon comparatively slow conscious assessments. These human judgments serve to cut down drastically the number of serious possibilities that need to be considered at each stage of calculation, and much greater depth can be achieved in the analysis, when the time is available, than in the machine's simply calculating and directly eliminating possibilities, without using such judgments (Penrose 13).
Such judgments, then, would be seen as the essence of human intelligence and thus of what we call thought, and the purpose of AI researchers is to create a machine that can make judgments rather than simply testing calculations. We think we would be able to tell when a machine is making judgments and when it is only analyzing and calculating possibilities, and this has become an interesting argument in considering the questions of whether computers can think. In 1991 a tournament was held in Boston. A group of human jud
...