The Turing Test and Machine Intelligence

Alan Turing (1912–1954), the British mathematician and logician whose wartime codebreaking work at Bletchley Park had already demonstrated the practical power of mechanical computation, published "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" in the philosophy journal Mind, vol. 59, no. 236 (October 1950). Judging the question "Can machines think?" too ill-defined to be useful, Turing proposed replacing it with an operational criterion he called the "imitation game": in its original formulation, a human interrogator communicates by written messages with a man and a woman, each in a separate room, and must determine which is which, while the man tries to deceive the interrogator and the woman tries to assist; Turing then asks what happens to the interrogator's success rate when a machine takes the man's place and likewise tries to be mistaken for the woman.