This page is part of the Robotics and Artificial Intelligence section.

The test was introduced by Alan Turing in his 1950 paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence, which proposed the question: "Can machines think?" Turing was unable to define thinking so he replaced the questions with  "Are there imaginable digital computers which would do well in the imitation game?" He believed that this question could be answered. In the years since 1950, the test has proven to be both highly influential and widely criticized, and it is an essential concept in the philosophy of artificial intelligence.

The "imitation game", is played with three people a person (A), a computer (B) and an interrogator (C). The interrogator is alone in room and may question the other two to determine which is the person and which is the computer. He knows them only by the labels X and Y. At the end of the game he says either, "X is A and Y is B" or "X is B and Y is A." If the machine "tricks" the interrogator, is is said to be intelligent.

Links

The Turing Test Page