The Turing test asks not whether machines think, but whether they can fool us
Alan Turing sidestepped an unanswerable question by inventing a game — and set the benchmark for machine intelligence.
In 1950, mathematician Alan Turing opened his paper “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” (in the journal Mind) by declaring the question “Can machines think?” too vague to answer.
In its place he proposed the “imitation game,” now called the Turing test. A human interrogator holds a text conversation with two unseen partners — one person, one machine — and tries to tell which is which. If the interrogator cannot reliably distinguish the machine from the human, the machine is said to have passed.
Turing’s move was to replace a philosophical puzzle about consciousness with a practical, behavioural test: judge a machine by what it does, not by what it secretly “is.”
He predicted an interrogator would have no more than a 70% chance of correctly identifying the machine after five minutes of questioning.
More than seven decades on, the Turing test remains the most famous — and most debated — yardstick for artificial intelligence.
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