I had planned on commenting on misbehaving.net a couple of days ago, but I didn’t get around to it. I would, however, like to comment on the most recent post, which includes the following: “This is nothing new, of course, way before the age of Lara Croft, Alan Turing’s famous test of a true simulation of a human being involved a computer pretending to be not merely human, but a woman.” The post then links to Turing’s paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence. Here’s the thing: Turing doesn’t say anything about a computer pretending to be a woman, sorry. I have no idea where this mistake came from - I had thought the poster had confused the example Turing used to elucidate the imitation game with the imitation game itself, but even if that were the case it’s still wrong. Turing first describes a game in which two humans, one male and one female, interact with a third human who cannot see or hear them, and the third must guess which is male and which is female. This is not the imitation game itself, but merely an introduction to the real Turing test, which specifies absolutely nothing about gender: the only stipulation is that instead of trying to assign genders, the human guesser must determine which of the two other participants is human and which is a machine. A machine that passed the Turing test would be one that fooled the human guesser for a certain percentage of trials. And, incidentally, Turing also wasn’t trying to come up with a test for “a true simulation of a human being,” but rather an analysis of intelligence - what it is for something to be a thinking thing. It’s all very Cartesian. Honestly, I’m all for empowerment (or whatever), but displaying a lack of basic reading comprehension skills doesn’t do anything to further the site’s desire to “discuss women’s contributions to computing, and also to highlight opportunities and challenges within the field.”