A test of whether you can tell a machine from a person just by chatting with them.
The Turing test comes from the "imitation game" that British mathematician Alan Turing proposed in a 1950 paper. A judge chats in text with two hidden partners: one is a person, one is a machine. If the judge can't reliably tell which is the machine, the machine passes.
"Can machines think?" is hard to answer, so Turing swapped it for a question about behavior you can observe. Some recent experiments found chat AIs hard to tell apart from people in short conversations. Still, many argue that sounding human isn't the same as understanding, so today it's seen as one yardstick among many.
Think of it like this
Imagine chatting with a stranger in a group chat. Could you tell from the messages alone whether it's a classmate or a chatbot? Turing turned that guessing game into a test of machine intelligence.
For example
Turing replaced "Can machines think?" with "Can a machine do well at this game?"
Records about this
Source-checked moments from AI history.
Set up a framework for judging machine intelligence by behavior rather than by internal structure. The prototype of today's debates over benchmarks