concept
Turing Test
A test of whether a machine can converse indistinguishably from a human.
Origin
Proposed by Alan Turing in his 1950 paper 'Computing Machinery and Intelligence' as the 'imitation game': if a judge in a text-only conversation can't reliably tell which interlocutor is the machine, the machine has passed. Turing meant it as a way to dodge the unanswerable question 'can machines think?' by replacing it with one we can actually run.
Modern usage
Constantly invoked in AI discourse, now usually to argue we've moved past it. 'Reverse Turing test' โ proving you're human (CAPTCHAs) โ is increasingly the live problem.
Tags
ai
intelligence
imitation