1950
British mathematician Alan Turing's landmark paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" is published in Mind.2 This paper is a foundational text in AI and addresses the question, "Can machines think?" Turing's approach established a foundation for future discussions on the nature of thinking machines and how their intelligence might be measured via the "imitation game,” now known as the Turing Test. Turing introduced a thought experiment to avoid directly answering the question "Can machines think?" Instead, he rephrased the problem into a more specific, operational form: Can a machine exhibit intelligent behavior indistinguishable from that of a human?
The Turing Test has become a central concept in AI, serving as one way to measure machine intelligence by assessing a machine's ability to convincingly mimic human conversation and behavior.