What is the Turing test?

Turing's thought experiment

In 1950, Alan Turing asked: "Can a machine think?" His paper described the imitation game: a human judge converses with an unknown partner — if they cannot determine whether it's a human or machine, the machine passes the test.

Has AI already passed the Turing test?

In 2014, a chatbot called "Eugene Goostman" claimed to have passed — controversially. Modern LLMs like GPT-4 and Claude convince most people in informal conversations that they are talking to a human.

Criticism

• The philosophical argument — John Searle's 'Chinese Room': a system can give right answers without understanding
• The deception argument — the test measures convincing, not understanding
• Not comprehensive — only measures linguistic performance

Turing's legacy

The test remains culturally and philosophically relevant. It made us think about what intelligence is and where the boundary lies between human and machine.