Alan Turing proposes the ‘imitation game’ (Turing test)
Confirmed
Importance: historic (5 of 5)The takeaway
Alan Turing’s paper ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence’ asked ‘Can machines think?’ and proposed the imitation game, later called the Turing test, as an operational criterion.
Status
- Claim
Confirmed
- Our reporting
- High confidence
- Importance
- Historic (5 of 5)
- Last verified
- 29 September 2026
Your AI and this story
- GPT-6 AstraIn its training data
- Claude Opus 5.5In its training data
- Gemini 4 HydrogenIn its training data
- Grok 4.7In its training data
It happened before the cutoffs of all four assistants, so it can be in their training data.
Key facts
- Published in the journal Mind, vol. LIX, no. 236 (October 1950)
- Replaced ‘Can machines think?’ with a conversational imitation game
- Anticipated and rebutted objections (theological, ‘Lady Lovelace’, etc.)
- Proposed ‘learning machines’ modeled on a child’s mind
What happened
Turing published a philosophical paper framing machine intelligence in behavioral terms: if a machine’s text conversation is indistinguishable from a human’s, it should be credited with thinking.
Why it matters
The Turing test became the most famous benchmark in AI’s popular imagination and framed debates about machine intelligence for 70+ years; LLMs revived the debate in the 2020s.
Sources
2 sources from 2 sites. Numbers match the chips in the text.
2 sources: 1 primary, 1 reaction
Primary
- Computing Machinery and Intelligence (DOI)doi.org, paper
Reactions
- Wikipedia: Computing Machinery and Intelligenceen.wikipedia.org, discussion
Changes
- Filed