A brief introduction to the (obsolete) Turing test, chatbots, and generative AI

Alan Turing proposed his famous test, which he called The Imitation Game, in a paper titled Computing Machinery and Intelligence, published in 1950 in the journal Mind – A Quarterly Review of Psychology and Philosophy (see https://www.abelard.org/turpap/turpap.php#the_imitation_game). In the original text, Turing imagined a game where a player would have to guess the sex – male or female – of a hidden person by typing questions on a teletype. Then, he suggested that a truly intelligent machine would be one where you would not be able to distinguish if the hidden personality on the other end of the teletype was a human or a computer software program.

Note

The movie The Imitation Game stars Benedict Cumberbatch as Alan Turing and features his role in breaking German code in WWII as part of the mathematicians of Bletchley Park. The title refers to Turing’s original name of...