the Turing test
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Alan Turing's 1950 proposal to judge machine intelligence by whether it can converse indistinguishably from a human.
Rather than ask 'can machines think', Turing reframed it as an imitation game: if a human judge cannot reliably tell the machine from a person by text alone, the question is answered pragmatically. It set the terms for decades of debate about artificial intelligence.
Also known as: imitation game, Turing test
Sources
- Turing, 'Computing Machinery and Intelligence', Mind (1950)