Turing proposes the Imitation Game
Alan Turing sidesteps 'can machines think?' with a test anyone can run
Quick facts
- Author
- Alan M. Turing
- Published in
- Mind, Vol. 59, No. 236, pp. 433-460
- Later name
- The Turing Test
What happened
In 'Computing Machinery and Intelligence,' published in the philosophy journal Mind, Alan Turing set aside the question 'Can machines think?' as too bound up in ambiguous definitions, and replaced it with the imitation game. An interrogator exchanges typewritten messages with two hidden respondents, one human and one machine, and must decide which is which. Turing proposed that if a machine could make the interrogator guess wrong about as often as a human competitor would, that performance should count as thinking, regardless of what is happening inside the machine. He devoted much of the paper to answering objections to this standard, including arguments from consciousness, mathematical limits, and the claim that machines could never do anything genuinely new.
Why it matters
The test reframed intelligence as an external, behavioral standard rather than an internal state, and it gave the nascent field both its most famous benchmark and its most durable argument: whether passing a conversation test is evidence of thought or just of good mimicry is still disputed by philosophers and AI researchers.
How we know
The 1950 Mind paper is preserved and readable in full; the imitation game, its rules, and Turing's responses to specific objections appear exactly as originally published.
Sources
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. The Turing Test · Reputable sourceplato.stanford.edu · The domain "plato.stanford.edu" is on our Reputable source registry. · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
- A. M. Turing, Mind. Computing Machinery and Intelligence · Primary source (author-declared)courses.cs.umbc.edu · Cited as a "primary" source (no stronger domain match).
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