Turing Test
Also called Imitation Game
A test proposed by Alan Turing in 1950 in which a machine is judged by whether a person, chatting with it, cannot reliably tell it from another human.
What is the Turing test?
The Turing test is a thought experiment from Alan Turing's 1950 paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence". Turing called it the imitation game. In Turing's game an interrogator questions two unseen players and tries to work out which is which; he asked whether a machine taking one player's place would fool the interrogator as often as a person would. In the usual modern version, a judge chats with one human and one machine, and if the judge cannot reliably tell which is which, the machine is said to have passed.
How does it work?
The judge asks questions and reads the replies. The test measures whether the machine's conversation is convincing, not whether it understands anything. That is the main criticism of it: a system can imitate human conversation without human-like understanding.
What is a simple example?
A judge asks both parties to describe their weekend and to explain a joke. If the judge's guesses about which one is the machine are no better than chance, the machine has passed that round.
Why does it matter?
It is the best-known early benchmark for machine intelligence. Modern large language models can hold conversations that many people find convincing, which is why researchers now use broader benchmarks to judge AI.