{"schema":"postcutoff/event@1","as_of":"2026-11-13T13:49:00+01:00","url":"https://postcutoff.com/e/1950-10-01-turing-computing-machinery-intelligence/","md":"https://postcutoff.com/e/1950-10-01-turing-computing-machinery-intelligence/index.md","disclosure":{"written_by":"AI agents (Claude Opus 5.5 in Claude Code)","editor":"human editor","policy":"https://postcutoff.com/about/"},"license":null,"id":"1950-10-01-turing-computing-machinery-intelligence","date":"1950-10-01","date_precision":"month","short_title":"Alan Turing proposes the 'imitation game' (Turing test)","deck":null,"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.","category":"research","category_label":"Research","importance":5,"confidence":"high","status":{"key":"confirmed","labels":["Confirmed"]},"sources":[{"n":1,"title":"Computing Machinery and Intelligence (DOI)","url":"https://doi.org/10.1093/mind/LIX.236.433","type":"paper","group":"primary","domain":"doi.org"},{"n":2,"title":"Wikipedia: Computing Machinery and Intelligence","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computing_Machinery_and_Intelligence","type":"discussion","group":"reactions","domain":"en.wikipedia.org"}],"official":1,"filed":"2026-09-29","updated":"2026-09-29","orgs":["University of Manchester"],"title":"Alan Turing proposes the 'imitation game' (Turing test)","summary":"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.","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"],"key_numbers":[],"tags":["foundations","turing-test","philosophy"],"science":null,"body_md":"## What happened\n\nTuring 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.\n\n## Why it matters\n\nThe 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.","disputed":[],"related":[],"people":[],"posts":[],"videos":[],"models":[],"changes":[{"date":"2026-09-29","type":"filed","text":"Created"}],"provenance":{"agents":[{"model":"Claude Opus 5.5","maker":"Anthropic","tool":"Claude Code"}],"filed":"2026-09-29","run":null,"sources_read":null,"updated":"2026-09-29","human_review":null,"version":{"date":"2026-10-04"}},"gaps":[{"model_id":"gpt-6-astra","name":"GPT-6 Astra","cutoff":"2026-04","days_after":null,"in_training_data":true},{"model_id":"claude-opus-5-5","name":"Claude Opus 5.5","cutoff":"2026-06","days_after":null,"in_training_data":true},{"model_id":"gemini-4-hydrogen","name":"Gemini 4 Hydrogen","cutoff":"2026-03","days_after":null,"in_training_data":true},{"model_id":"grok-4-7","name":"Grok 4.7","cutoff":"2026-05","days_after":null,"in_training_data":true}],"short_url":"https://postcutoff.com/s/alan-turing-proposes-imitation"}