Turing Test
The 1950 proposal that a machine should count as thinking if it can pass for human in conversation — a test of deception, which Turing said plainly and everyone forgot.
When not to use it
- As a benchmark. No pass mark, no standard judge, no time limit. It's unfalsifiable in practice.
- As a definition of intelligence. Turing called it the imitation game and meant it — a behavioural substitute for a question he thought unanswerable.
- As evidence a system passed something meaningful. ELIZA passed with 200 lines of pattern-matching in 1966.
- To measure superhuman ability. A machine better than humans at arithmetic has to pretend to be worse to pass.
Reach for something else instead
- Capability evaluations — can it do this task, this reliably? No claim about minds.
- Winograd schemas — a serious attempt at world knowledge. Also solved.
- Task-specific benchmarks — narrow, measurable, honest about what they measure.
- Adversarial evaluation — test what breaks, not what convinces.
This entry is part of a longer guide: What is artificial intelligence?
Sources & further reading
- Turing (1950), Computing Machinery and Intelligence — read it; it's short, funny, and much better than its reputation.
- Searle (1980), Minds, Brains, and Programs — the Chinese Room; forty-five years unresolved.
- Levesque, Davis & Morgenstern (2012), The Winograd Schema Challenge — the serious replacement, also solved.
Primary sources, listed so you can check the claims on this page rather than take them on trust.
Where people go wrong
- Citing it as the standard for machine intelligence. It's a proposal to stop asking that question.
- Treating a pass as significant. It's been passed; the field correctly ignored it.
- Forgetting it measures the judge. ELIZA's results were about people, not the program.
- Thinking the goalposts moved. They may have — or we may only ever learn what we meant by watching something achieve it.
At a glance
FieldFoundations
Year1950
Its real namethe imitation game
What it testswhether a machine can pass for human, which is deception, not thought
Statuspassed, and correctly ignored
The lessonevery test of "real intelligence" has fallen and been disowned
DifficultyBeginner
Flashcards for this concept
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Often compared with
Turing Test vs. capability evaluation — one asks whether a machine can pass for human and gets you deception; the other asks whether it can do the task and gets you an answer.