Alan Turing proposes the 'imitation game' (Turing test)
Alan Turing's paper 'Computing Machinery and Intelligence' asked 'Can machines think?' and proposed the imitation game, later called the Turing test, as an operational criterion.
Key facts
- Published in the journal Mind, vol. LIX, no. 236 (October 1950)
- Replaced 'Can machines think?' with a conversational imitation game
- Anticipated and rebutted objections (theological, 'Lady Lovelace', etc.)
- Proposed 'learning machines' modeled on a child's mind
What happened
Turing published a philosophical paper framing machine intelligence in behavioral terms: if a machine's text conversation is indistinguishable from a human's, it should be credited with thinking.
Why it matters
The Turing test became the most famous benchmark in AI's popular imagination and framed debates about machine intelligence for 70+ years; LLMs revived the debate in the 2020s.
Changelog
- 2026-09-29: created
Sources (2)
- paperComputing Machinery and Intelligence (DOI)
- discussionWikipedia: Computing Machinery and Intelligence
id: 1950-10-01-turing-computing-machinery-intelligence · updated 2026-09-29 · open in the interactive timeline