In 1950, Alan Turing wrote his landmark paper COMPUTING MACHINERY AND INTELLIGENCE , where he probes the question “Can machines think?”
At the time, it was widely believed that there was something special about human intelligence and that computers would never be able to perform certain tasks, like understand language or play chess at a high level. Part of the paper was a point by point takedown of all the common objections to machine intelligence.
As a part of this exercise, he proposed a thought experiment. If a human was an allowed to ask and unknown and unseen subject an unlimited number of questions, and could not determine whether it was a human or a computer, then we might consider the possibility the computer might have some kind of intelligence. This has come to be known as the Turing Test.
The Turing Test has been extremely misunderstood. Many people take it to be a definitive test of real computer intelligence, but Turing never meant it this way. Instead it was more of a thought provoking notion to get people to consider exactly what machine intelligence meant.
There are modern Turing Test competitions, but in general, they are less about machine intelligence, and more about human psychology, and how humans might be deceived by clever programming tricks.
