Computing Machinery and Intelligence
Alan Turing's 1950 paper that asked whether machines can think and proposed testing it through an imitation game, now known as the Turing test.
"Computing Machinery and Intelligence" is a 1950 paper by Alan Turing. It opens with the question "Can machines think?" and, finding that question too vague, replaces it with a practical test: the imitation game, in which an interrogator tries to tell a machine from a person using only written conversation. This became known as the Turing test.
The paper also answers a set of objections to machine intelligence and discusses the idea of machines that learn.
Why it still matters
It established the habit of replacing abstract questions about intelligence with questions about behavior under specified conditions, which is close to the modern advice to ask what a particular AI system does under specific conditions, with specific authority and consequences. Later work followed, including the Dartmouth proposal in 1955 and Cahit Arf's 1959 lecture, which put the threshold in adaptation. Debates about AGI still echo it.
Read more in Cahit Arf's 1959 question about thinking machines.
Related terms
Dartmouth proposal
The 1955 proposal for a summer research project at Dartmouth that named the field 'artificial intelligence' and set out the aim of making machines simulate aspects of human intelligence.
Cahit Arf
Turkish mathematician (1910–1997) who published a 1959 lecture asking whether machines can think. He is known for the Arf invariant and Hasse–Arf theorem, and his adaptation threshold remains useful.
AGI
Artificial general intelligence: a hypothetical AI that matches human ability across a wide range of tasks. Definitions vary, which is why the practical question is which capability threshold changed a decision.