Portrait of Alan Turing

Turing's 'Computing Machinery and Intelligence'

Research BreakthroughsTheoretical Foundations
Impact

What Happened

Alan Turing published his landmark paper in the journal Mind, proposing the 'Imitation Game' (now known as the Turing Test) as a way to evaluate machine intelligence. He asked: 'Can machines think?' and argued the question itself was meaningless — what mattered was whether a machine could convincingly imitate human conversation.

Why It Mattered

Defined the philosophical framework for AI research for decades. The Turing Test remains the most famous benchmark for machine intelligence, even as modern AI has moved beyond it.

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Part of the Theoretical Foundations (1943–1955) era · Browse all research breakthroughs · View all 1950 milestones

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