In October 1950, Mind published Alan Turing’s “Computing Machinery and Intelligence.” Instead of defining “thinking,” he proposed the imitation game—later popularized as the Turing test—to assess whether a machine can be indistinguishable from a human in conversation.
Turing answered theological, mathematical, and consciousness objections, and estimated that by the year 2000 machines might fool interrogators with some probability. The essay set the philosophical frame of emerging AI.
Though the test is controversial today—it can be passed via linguistic style without guaranteed understanding—it remains a cultural reference and a reminder that evaluating artificial intelligence is itself a design problem.
