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’s conclusion is that computers can perform a program according to how they have been programmed but never understand what is actually that they are doing. Thus, there can be no discussion of whether the computer actually has intelligence or not.

Coming back to the idea of creating a new test, based on one or more philosophical interpretations of the mind, the one that seems most probable of designing is the one based on behaviorism. Indeed, the behaviorist theory supposes that most basic responses are learnt and integrated into complex patterns by a process of conditioning. According to the behaviorists, one of the main ways of conditioning – “operant conditioning” supposed that a response that has repeatedly followed by a reinforcing stimulus will occur with greater frequency and will thus be “selected” over other possible responses.