PLACEBO EFFECT -- read it u'll like it

this is a piece of info which i read in the times of india and really liked it....
it was on the editorial page.....hope u will like it too......just go thru it

The Turing Test, named after the English mathematician Alan Turing, is still thought to be the best test to determine whether a machine is intelligent or not. It goes something like this: a human judge engages in a natural language conversation with two other parties who remain hidden from sight — one, another human, and the other a machine. If the judge cannot reliably tell which is which, then the machine is said to pass the test. Fair enough. After all, that's how we normally judge other people to have the same kind of intellectual capacity as ourselves. But some critics say this test can be rigged. What if the machine had been programmed to give exactly the type of responses that one would expect from a human under the same circumstances? In which case, even if it passed the judge's pronouncement, wouldn't the rest of us know that the intelligence being certified was merely that of the programmer and not the machine? It would not prove to us that there was a consciousness — or at least even a psychological entity — under that silicon circuitry. No, to prove the existence of an awareness inside a machine, we need another type of test altogether. One which would have to demonstrate an internal mind in operation. That would be something like the placebo test. A placebo is an inert treatment, a dummy medicine containing no active ingredient of any real benefit to the body but that nevertheless makes lot of people feel better after receiving it. Scientists believe this happens because when administered by an authority figure like a physician or researcher, a placebo tricks the mind into causing the brain to effect physiological changes in the body. Now a placebo wouldn't work on a horse because the animal doesn't even know it's receiving medication — much less a fake drug. However, if it still works, we would have to conclude the horse has a mind that can be fooled into healing itself. Similarly, the day a phoney antivirus patch can cause a computer's operating system to get rid of an infection by using its own existing hardware capability, we would know there was awareness in there. One which, ironically, didn't know what was actually going on when the inactive remedy was being administered.