Alan Turing (1912-54) was a brilliant British mathematician and is best-known for helping decipher the code created by German Enigma machines in the Second World War, and for being one of the founders of computer science and artificial intelligence.

In 1950, his article Computing Machinery and Intelligence appeared in the philosophy journal Mind in which he posed the question "Can a Machine Think?" and if so, how could this be measured? He suggested that if a computer could give answers that could not be told apart from answers a human may give, then it could be said that the computer was thinking. This field is generally known as natural language processing.

The Turing Test

Alan developed the Turing Test to evaluate if a machine could convince us it was human. The test involved a computer and a person engaging in a scripted typed conversation in real time and the objective was for a human judge to see if they could tell the machine from the human and if they couldn’t then the machine passed the test.

The Imitation Game

The test wasn’t focussed on whether or not the computer had given correct answers to questions but on how closely answers resembled those a human would give. Rather than trying to determine if a machine is thinking, Turing suggests we should ask if the machine can win a game, called the "Imitation Game".

The Loebner Prize