CONCEPT
The Lovelace Test
Marcus du Sautoy’s criterion for genuine machine creativity—requiring that an output be new, surprising, and valuable in a way that cannot be explained as a consequence of the programmer’s intentions.
Ada Lovelace, writing in the nineteenth century about Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine, asked whether such a machine could ever
originate anything—or whether it could only do whatever we knew how to order it to perform.
Marcus du Sautoy took that question and sharpened it into a test. An algorithm clears the Lovelace bar only when its output is new, surprising, and of value,
and—the load-bearing condition—when the output cannot be explained as a mere consequence of what the programmer put in. The first three conditions are demanding; the fourth is where the test acquires its teeth, because it insists on a question of
attribution: does the creative act belong to the system or to its makers? The test converts a metaphysical argument about machine minds into something closer to an empirical one, replacing the unanswerable question of whether a system is conscious with the examinable question of whether its output transcends its design.
Move 37, the position AlphaGo placed in the second