The Turing Test

In “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” Alan Turing proposes reframing the question “Can machines think?” as a behavioral test: can a machine sustain a conversation that is indistinguishable from a human’s? He calls this the imitation game.

The test has been criticized on multiple grounds – it conflates performance with understanding, it rewards deception, and passing it doesn’t require any of the internal properties we typically associate with intelligence. But its influence on AI research has been enormous, and its framing shapes popular discourse about AI to this day: intelligent behavior is treated as evidence of intelligence, even when the mechanism producing that behavior is very different from human cognition.

Source: Alan M. Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” Mind, 59(236), 1950, 433–460.