Alan Turing was a pioneer in the field of computers and cryptography. In 1950 he proposed a test to determine if a computer had achieve the threshold for "artificial intelligence."
Turing's test was simple. A human would converse with (and interrogate) an entitity from a distance (e.g., over a keyboard or from a different room). During a fixed point in time (perhaps 15 minutes), the interrogator would attempt to determine if the entity was human or computer. If a computer could behave in a way that allowed the human to conclude he or she was conversing with another human, the computer was said to have passed the Turing Test.
The Turing Test is just one of many proposed tests for artificial intelligence. Although not believed to be a worthwhile test by many experts, it nonetheless has been highly influential and still resonates more than 70 years after its proposal.
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