Turing's Imitation Game

What happened

In his paper 'Computing Machinery and Intelligence,' Alan Turing set aside the question 'Can machines think?' as too vague, and proposed instead an 'imitation game': if an interrogator conversing by text cannot reliably tell a machine from a human, the machine should count as intelligent. It became known as the Turing Test.

Why it matters

Turing's paper framed the central question of artificial intelligence and gave the field its most famous benchmark, decades before the technology existed to attempt it.

Sources

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. The Turing Test · Reputable source