I’m reading “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!” which is, by the way, fantastic. He is instantly likable, and his stories are incredible in many ways. I was reading last night when I came across a passage about him watching a paramecium under a microscope:

I watched these paramecia hit something, recoil, turn through an angle, and go again. The idea that it’s mechanical, like a computer program - it doesn’t look that way. They go different distances, they recoil different distances, they turn through angles that are different in various cases; they don’t always turn to the right; they’re very irregular. It looks random, because you don’t know what they’re hitting; you don’t know all the chemicals they’re smelling, or what.

In light of this, I suggest a new metric for judging artificial intelligence - the Paramecium Turing Test. The paramecium chats with two agents for five minutes, and tries to decide which one’s a computer.