* Humans have always been aware of the world around them -- and of themselves, aware that they have a conscious mind that perceives, feels, thinks, and drives action. Eventually, humans got to wondering exactly what the mind was, and what it was all about -- though for millennia, the only "explanations" were based on myth and mysticism.
With the introduction of modern science, people began to wonder if the mind could be explained in more specific terms; and later, with the introduction of electronic computing, whether humans could build machines with minds, and how they would compare to human minds. That question was formally posed by the British mathematician Alan Turing in 1950, with Turing suggesting a test to compare human and machine minds.
His "Turing test" was less an answer than a starting point for the task of understanding the characteristics of, and differences between, the two kinds of minds. This document, in the spirit of Turing, provides a comparative examination of the minds of humans and machines. A list of illustration credits is included at the end.
